LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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♦UNITED STATES OP AMERICA. 

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Christ Liveth in Me. 



BY THE 

Rev. WILLIAM P. BREED, D.D., 

Author of "Grapes from the Great Vine," "Sunny Mount," etc. 



- 




PHILADELPHIA Z 

PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION, 

1334 CHESTNUT STREET. 



/*/'■ 







Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by 

THE TRUSTEES OF THE 

PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION, 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



Westcott & Thomson, 
Stereotypes^ Philada. 



Christ Liveth in Me. 



i. 

T IKE a flower in a nosegay, a crystal in 
a nest of crystals, a star in a constella- 
tion, is this word of the apostle among the 
words surrounding it. It is associated with 
a series of precious gospel paradoxes. (Gal- 
atians ii. 20.) 

"I am crucified." I, the writer of these 
words, am a crucified man. I have been 
accused, arrested, tried and convicted, con- 
demned and nailed hand and foot to the 
cross ! 

" I am crucified with Christ," in company 
with Christ — Christ crucified in Jerusalem 
fifteen hundred miles or more away, and I at 



4 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME, 

home in company with him — Christ thirty 
years ago, and I now "with him ! 

" Nevertheless I live/' Crucified and yet 
alive. Why, crucifixion is the death-penalty! 
Christ's crucifixion is bearing the wrath and 
curse of God for sin. The wages of sin is 
death — for mortal man death of the body 
and death of the soul, and that for ever ! 

But I am crucified with Christ, and, in 
company with him, I have borne the penalty 
of sin, and that penalty is thus twofold 
death, and yet I live ! I am now alive, and 
with a life whose fires will never cease to 
burn while glory blazes from the throne of 
God. For it is with Christ that I am cruci- 
fied, hidden away in him, hidden so securely 
there in the secret of his tabernacle that the 
woes of the garden, the scourge-lash and 
crown-thorn, nail-thrust and spear-point, ex- 
pended their all of wrath on him and could 
not reach to me. I am crucified in my Sub- 
stitute, and therefore I live — live a crucified 
man. 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 5 

And yet not I. I and not I. I died, yet 
not I. I live, and yet not I — not the old I. 

For when I found such union with Christ, 
when I had obtained such access and en- 
trance into the Rock of Ages as that his 
death came in the place of mine — his death 
all undeserved in place of mine, so richly 
merited, and thus in law 'his death became 
my death — then I became a new creature. 
" Therefore if any man be in Christ he is a 
new creature. Old things are passed 
away " — the " old man," the " old nature" — 
11 and all things are become new." 2 Cor. v. 
17. "Ye have put off the old man with 
his deeds, and have put on the new man, 
which is renewed in knowledge after the 
imaee of Him that created him." Col. iii. 
9, 10. Renewed in the spirit of the 
mind ; the new man put on which after 
God is created in righteousness and true 
holiness. Eph. iv. 22-24. "For we are his 
workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto 
good works." Eph. ii. 10. And the I that 



6 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

now lives is this new creature. It is indeed 
the same old body and the same mental 
faculties, without addition, without subtrac- 
tion, the same moral powers, but a new 
life in them. There is a poor hyssop weed 
growing out of the wall, and a murderous 
frost passing by robs it of its life. But He 
who made it comes that way, has pity on 
the poor dead thing, transplants it from the 
hard, niggardly bosom of the wall to the 
generous, nutritious hillside, and then, in- 
stead of sending pursuers after the frost 
robber to bring back the old life, imparts a 
new and better, and, lo ! the hyssop weed is 
become a cedar of Lebanon ! I was that 
hyssop, and now, through grace, I am that 
cedar ! I was a weed growing out of the 
old Adamic wall, and the frosts that 
blighted Eden and made our world a place 
of wailing killed me and left me dead in 
trespasses and sins. But the Creator of 
heaven and earth passed by and had com- 
passion on me in my desolation, and in 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 7 g 

that sovereign love that removes misery and 
imparts joy in its stead, out of pure delight 
at making glad and seeing the gladness it 
has made, by his Spirit took me out of that 
old sin-smitten wall, whose surface and 
chinks abounded in all hideous and un- 
sightly things (Gal. v. 19-21), and planting 
me in the soil and sunshine of Zion — " Ye 
are come unto Mount Zion " — imparted to 
me a new life. This life is not the old 
Adamic life, but the new Christ life. " And 
now I live, yet not I, for Christ liveth in me, 
and the life which I now live in the flesh I live 
by the faith of the Son of God, who loved 
me and gave himself for me." Thus it is 
hardly even the new creature into which I 
have been transformed that now lives. For 
as the physical universe is itself upheld by 
divine power, and without that support 
would sink to annihilation, so this new I, 
this new creature, lives only in the life of 
another. I live only as faith takes hold on 
the Son of God and drinks in life from the 



S CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

Fountain. This faith which he gives is the 
eye that sees him, that the whole soul may 
love him. It is a door opened by himself 
in the soul through which the rays of his 
light constantly flow. 

" I love my God, but with no love of mine, 

For I have none to give ; 
I love thee, Lord, but all the love is thine, 

For by thy life I live. 
I am as nothing, and rejoice to be 
Emptied and lost and swallowed up in thee. 

« Thou, Lord, alone art all thy children need, 

And there is none beside ; 
From thee the streams of blessedness proceed, 

In thee the blest abide — 
Fountain of life and all-abounding grace, 
Our source, our centre and our dwelling-place !" 









ii. 

\^/E in Christ — Christ in us. In these 
words (Galatians ii. 20) we are con- 
fronted with that twin mystery of the gos- 
pel, the mutual in-being of Christ and be- 
lievers — Christ in them, they in him — and 
through this mystic union the strange iden- 
tity of saint and Saviour. 

1. The identity. Put together two watch- 
glasses with their concave surfaces facing 
each other, and you have an object resem- 
bling in shape the enormous mass of stars, 
the nebula, of which our solar system forms 
a part. But there is another and a brighter 
11 milky way." Its constellations are the va- 
rious families, denominations of those who 
love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity, its 
individual stars ransomed souls, its head 



10 CHRIST LJVETH IN ME,. 

and light and life the Son of God, and he 
and they together form one body in the 
spiritual heavens. 

" The Church which is his body, the full- 
ness of Him that filleth all in all." Eph. i. 23. 

"Now ye are the body of Christ and 
members in particular." 1 Cor. xii. 27. 

"The Church is the veritable, mystical 
body of Christ, yea, the recipient of the 
plenitudes of Him who filleth all things, 
whether in heaven or on earth, with all the 
things, elements and entities of which they 
are composed." 

"His body, not in a figure merely; it is 
veritably his body, not that which in our 
glorified humanity he personally bears, but 
that in which he as the Christ of God is 
manifested and glorified by spiritual organ- 
ization. He is its Head; from him comes 
its life ; it is, in the innermost reality, him- 
self." 

"I am the Vine, ye are the branches." 
But the Vine and the branches are one 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. II 

Vine. "To whom coming as to a living 
stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen 
of God, and precious, ye also, as lively stones, 
are built up a spiritual house, an holy priest- 
hood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, accept- 
able to God by Jesus Christ. Wherefore it 
is contained in Scripture, Behold I lay in 
Zion a chief corner-stone, elect, precious : he 
that believeth on him shall not be con- 
founded/' i Peter ii. 4-6. But the corner- 
stone and the other stones, built in together, 
form a single building. "He that eateth my 
flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, 
and I in him." John vi. 56. Here is ex- 
pressed a vital and organic union. 

Thus Christ and his people form one 
body, a strange unity in a marvelous vari- 
ety — a unity such that whoever touches one 
of these believers touches Jesus Christ 
(Matt. xxv. 40), a variety gathered from 
all nations, and kindreds, and people, and 
tongues, from " the green-damasked chapels 
of Peking, from the jungles of the Karens, 



12 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

from the hills of Armenia, the swamps of 
the Gulf of Guinea, the palm-groves of Ja- 
maica, from among the ferns of Raiatea, 
from around the crater of Hawaii, the vil- 
lages of the Cherokees and Dakotas, from 
among the milk-eaters of Russia," from 
every rank, class and disposition, all blended 
together in the moulding vitalities of this 
one mighty purifying Christ life ! 

2. Believers are in Christ. They are in 
Christ as the branch is in the vine. " I am 
the Vine, ye are the branches." Paul writes 
(Eph. i. i) to the " saints which are at Ephe- 
sus, and the faithful in Christ Jesus!' The 
faithful here are the believing ones, and all 
believing ones are in Christ. Then he 
writes to all the "saints in Christ Jesus 
which are at Philippi." Phil. i. i. The 
saints are holy ones, and all holy ones are 
in Christ. " Greet them of the household 
of Narcissus which are in the Lord." Rom. 
xvi. 1 1 . And in Eph. v. 30 we find this 
marvelous language : " For we are members 




CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 1 3 

of his body, and of his flesh, and of his 
bones/' 

"We are integral parts of his body, 
united to him not only as members of his 
mystical body, the Church, but by a more 
mysterious marital relation, in which Christ 
in his natural and now glorified body now 
stands, to his Church. Our real spiritual 
being and existence is as truly, as certainly 
and as actually a 'true native extract from 
his body' as was the physical derivation of 
Eve from AdamZ'* So truly are believers 
of and in Christ. 

3. Christ is in the believer. " I in them," 
said Jesus in that precious prayer which has 
been called the " Holy of Holies " of the 
New Testament. "If Christ be in you," 
writes Paul to the Romans, viii. 10. Yes, 
in all of the members of the visible Church 
who are not deceivers or deceived, Christ is. 
" Know ye not your own selves, how that 
Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be repro- 

* Ellicott. 



14 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 



bates ?" 2 Cor. xiii. 5. And he is so in them 
that they are himself. " Inasmuch as ye 
have done it unto one of the least of these 
my brethren, ye have done it unto me." 

Blessed, precious truth! Would that we 
saw it more clearly, penetrated farther into 
its depths, felt it more in our consciousness, 
this mutual in-being of Christ and Chris- 
tians, they in him, he in them, and they to- 
gether one constellation, one nebula, one 
starry universe ! 



#^ 



III. 

I. 

r I ^HE order of events in the constitution 
of this strange spiritual unity that re- 
sults in this mystical but real identification 
of saint and Saviour is a matter worthy of 
modest, devout-^meditation. We say mod- 
est, diffident, for in holy places like these 
we must put off our sandals and speak often, 
like the old Academics, in the spirit of ques- 
tion rather than assertion. In the words 
of Dr. A. A. Hodge this order is thus pre- 
sented: "This union is established mutu- 
ally, i. By the commencement of the effect- 
ual and permanent workings of the Holy 
Spirit within them in the act of the new birth, 
opening the eyes and renewing the will, and 
thus laying in their nature the foundation of 

15 



1 6 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME, 

the exercise of saving faith ; 2. Which faith is 
the sacred bond by which this mutual union 
is established, by the continued actings of 
which their fellowship with Christ is sus- 
tained and its blessed consequences devel- 
oped." 

1. The unbeliever is out of Christ, and in 
this exclusion is dead and helpless: "Out 
of me ye can do nothing." John xv. 5. 
"At that time ye were without Christ" — 
separated from him. Eph. ii. 12. 

2. The Spirit of God is the agent in 
transplanting man from the wilderness of 
sin into the Christ-garden. 

By him we are " baptized into Christ " — 
incorporated into his mystical body, and 
thereby have put on Christ. Gal. iii. 27. 

3. In this office-work of the Holy Ghost, 
he introduces into the dead soul a new life 
in place of that with which it had parted in 
the fall of the progenitor of the race. And 
you hath he quickened, brought to life, who 
were dead in trespasses and sins. Eph. ii. 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. I J 

i. Thus man is born again. He is now a 
" new creature." 

4. By this implantation of a new life one 
is united to Christ. By this vivifying act 
he is incorporated into Christ's mystical 
body, and now he is in Christ. For this 
new life is Christ life. Regeneration is that 
work by which one is baptized into Christ. 
" We are his workmanship, created in Christ 
Jesus" Eph. ii. 10. "If any man be in 
Christ, he is a new creature." 2 Cor. v. 17. 
Thus this communication to us of Christ's 
spiritual vitality unites us with, puts us into, 
Christ. 

5. But life must act, and the first act of 
the new creature is saving faith. Thus 
faith does not convey into Christ, but asserts 
the in-being in Christ. It does not effect 
the initial union with Christ, but asserts it. 
It is the fruit, not the root, of that union. 
Saving faith grows out of this union. It is 
the first bud on the newly-engrafted branch. 
Chronologically, the two events, the uniting 



1 8 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

act on the part of the Holy Ghost and the 
believing on the part of the soul, are con- 
temporaneous ; logically, the former pre- 
cedes and is the basis of the latter. 

For believing is the act of a living soul, 
and logically the life antecedes the act. To 
believe one's self into Christ were for a 
dead thing to live itself into life. But being 
made alive by the Holy Ghost implanting 
the Christ life within us, we at once believe, 
as the new-born child at once begins to 
breathe. 

Believing ones, then, are already in, and 
therefore believing does not put them into 
Christ. Thus we read of the " faithful in 
Christ " (Eph. i. i), that is, of those who, 
being in Christ, believe. 

Our introduction into Christ's body is the 
act of God, but our believing is our own 
act : of him, as the efficient cause, are ye 
in Christ Jesus, i Cor. i. 30. In the words 
of a gifted and now glorified servant of 
God (Dr. George Junkin), "Faith in the 



CHRIST LIVETII IN ME. 19 

principle, being a result of the Spirit's power- 
ful presence, can exist only where there is 
union with Christ, and is evincive rather than 
productive of such a union ; and the goings 
out of this faith in acts of holy confidence in 
God our Saviour become the evidence of 
that great change called regeneration." 

If the question be asked, What part, then, 
has faith in this union with Christ ? we an- 
swer that the primary initial union is all of 
God, and to him be the glory, but the com- 
pleted union, as experienced by God's peo- 
ple, is by operation of faith. The nurse 
lifts a sleeping child from the bed and lays 
it in the father's arms. The caresses of 
the father awaken the little one, and now, 
opening its eyes and recognizing that face 
that smiles on in its own, it throws its little 
arms around the father's neck and clings to 
him with all its little might ! That babe is 
the soul ; that nurse is the Holy Spirit : that 
Spirit takes up that soul in its sleep of 
death, and by laying it in Jesus' arms brings 



20 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

it into contact with a life that penetrates its 
whole being and makes it a new creature in 
Christ Jesus. Awakened to life by the ca- 
resses of the Saviour, it opens the eye, sees 
that smiling face, recognizes its condition of 
safety and forgiveness through him, and 
throws its arms around his neck in grateful 
love, and thus the union begun by the Holy 
Spirit is experienced and completed by faith. 
Thus faith is the response that the life gives 
to the Life-giver. 





IV. 

T3ELIEVERS are in Christ for justifi- 
cation, and Christ is in believers for 
sanctification. 

i. The believer is in Christ for justifica- 
tion. "Justification is an act of God's free 
grace wherein he pardons all our sins, and 
accepts us as righteous in his sight only for 
the righteousness of Christ imputed to us 
and received by faith alone." Pardon comes 
to us through Christ as the Satisfier of the 
penal claims of the law, and acceptance, as 
righteous in his sight, through Christ as the 
Satisfier of all the preceptive claims of the 
law, in both of which, in the doing and the 
enduring, he exhibited a perfect personal 
holiness. 

11 As many of you as have been baptized 

21 



22 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

into Christ have put on Christ!' Gal. iii. 27. 
" Before God we bear the name and person 
of Christ, and in him rather than in our- 
selves we are seen of God." 

We have put on Christ, but the Christ 
we have put on is he who is laden with all 
the fruits of a holy, active obedience, laden 
with all the spoils of a holy, passive obedi- 
ence, and in putting him on I have put these 
on, these two obediences, this twofold vir- 
tue, and therefore, first, there is no more 
condemnation for me in Christ Jesus (Rom. 
viii. 1) ; and therefore, second, there is ac- 
ceptance for me in the Beloved as one of 
the children of God. Eph. i. 5, 6. Thus in 
Christ we are completely justified. 

2. Christ is in the soul for its sanctifica- 
tion. For if Christ be in you, your soul, 
penetrated and occupied by the Spirit of 
God, is life, on account of implanted right- 
eousness, the sanctifying righteousness of 
that indwelling Spirit. Rom. viii. 10. Christ 
is in you as a fountain of holy life. " Who- 



CHRIST LIFE Til IN ME. 23 

soever drinketh of the water that I shall 
give him shall never thirst, but the water 
that I shall give him shall be in him a well 
of water springing up into everlasting life." 
John iv. 14. "I am life." John xiv. 6. He 
is in us as life. " I am the bread of life." 
John vi. 35. The bread we eat revivifies 
our weakened powers. It conveys life into 
us. And Christ in us is the bread of life. 

3. We are in Christ in order to his being 
in us. We are in him for justification in 
order that he may be in us for our sanctifi- 
cation. The branch is in the Vine in order 
that the Vine may be in the branch, in 
order that the vital forces, the living, nour- 
ishing fluids of the Vine, may pervade the 
branch and clothe it with leaves and glorify 
it with flowers and load it with fruit. We 
engraft a twig upon a fruit stalk in order 
that all the powers of the root and stalk 
may invigorate the branch. So we are in 
Christ that his spiritual vitalities may flow 
through us and make us like him. We 



24 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

plant a lily in the moisture, in order that the 
moisture may penetrate the lily. We put a 
transparency into the light, in order that the 
light may pervade the transparency. So 
we are in Christ that Christ may be in us. 
Christ is the " true Light." John i. 9. We 
are him, and hence we are light. " For ye 
were sometimes darkness, but now are ye 
light in the Lord!' Eph. v. 8. The soul in 
Christ clothes itself with all Messianic 
wealth for its justification, in order that 
Christ in the soul may flood it with Messi- 
anic glory for its sanctification. 

"Abide in me " — and what next ? " And 
I in you ;" — and what for but that ye may 
abound in fruitfulness ? 

One evidence that you are in Christ is 
found in the fact that he is in you. Surely, 
Christ is mightily in that one " in whom the 
love of God is perfected." For no such love 
of God is possible to man except through an 
indwelling Christ. "And hereby know we 
that we are in him!' 1 John ii. 5. 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 2$ 

Election is in Christ, and, so far as our 
moral character is concerned, the ultimate 
end of that election is sanctification. " Ac- 
cording as he hath chosen us in him, that 
we should be holy and without blame before 
him in love." In this same sense, sanctifi- 
cation is the ultimate object of Christ's 
death, " who gave himself for us that he 
might redeem us from all iniquity and purify 
to himself a peculiar people, zealous of good 
works." Titus ii. 14. Sanctification is also 
the object of the divine call. For God hath 
called us to holiness. 1 Thess. iv. 7. Thus, 
as it is to sanctification that we are chosen, 
and for our sanctification that Jesus died, 
and to sanctification that we are called, it is 
for our sanctification that he is in us. 

And in us he is our sanctification. But 
"of God," by his operative power, "are ye 
in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto 
us righteousness and sanctification." 1 Cor. 
i. 30. 

11 Righteousness is that which satisfies the 



26 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

demands of the law as a rule of justification ; 
sanctification or holiness is that which satis- 
fies the law as a rule of duty. Christ is 
both to us. He is our righteousness, be- 
cause by his obedience and death he has 
fully satisfied the demands of justice, so that 
we are " the righteousness of God in him." 
2 Cor. v. 21. When we stand before the 
judgment-seat of God, Christ is our right- 
eousness. He answers for us, he presents 
his own infinite merit as the all-sufficient 
reason for our justification. Rom. iii. 21, 22 ; 
Phil. iii. 9. He is our sanctification. His 
Spirit dwells in all his people as the spirit 
of holiness, so that they are transformed 
into his likeness from glory to glory* 

Thus we are in Christ for our justifica- 
tion ; Christ is in us for our sanctification ; 
and we are in Christ in order that Christ 
may be in us. 

* Dr. Charles Hodge. 



/^HRIST is in us by his Spirit. The 
body which Christ wore while on earth, 
raised from the sepulchre and glorified, is 
now at the right hand of God in heaven. 
His spiritual body, of which he is the head 
and of which his saints are the constituent 
members, like the milky way that glorifies 
the evening sky, is wherever the members 
are, some in heaven, some on earth. 

" One army of the living God, 
To his commands we bow ; 
Part of the host have crossed the flood, 
And part are crossing now," 

and part are bearing the heat and burden of 
the day, and part are in the flush of bloom- 
ing youth and maidenhood. But neither by 
that glorified nor by this spiritual body, but 

27 



28 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

by his Spirit, the Holy Spirit of God, is 
Jesus in his saints. " I," said the great Na- 
poleon in his island prison to General Ber- 
trand — " I have inspired men with such affec- 
tion that they would die for me, but my 
presence was needed, the lightning of my 
eye, my voice." When, however, that eye 
was on those soldiers and that voice was 
ringing in their ears, this " Man of Destiny " 
was, in a sense, in those men by his spirit. 
But in a vastly higher and in a very differ- 
ent sense is the Captain of our salvation, by 
his Spirit, in those who believe. In the one 
case there is merely the enthusiasm of a 
contagious, electric sympathy ; in the other 
case there is the effective operation of an 
intelligent, mighty life. 

As Christ is God, God is said to dwell in 
his people — "the high and lofty One with 
him that is of a contrite and humble spirit." 
To the Corinthians, Paul writes (2 Cor. vi. 1 6), 
"Ye are the temple of the living God. As 
God hath said, I will dwell in them and walk 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 29 

in them, and I will be their God and they 
shall be my people." Then Paul prayed for 
the Ephesians that " Christ might dwell in 
their hearts by faith." 

And Jesus unites the Father with the Son 
in this indwelling. " If a man love me, he 
will keep my words, and we will come unto 
him and make our abode with him." John 
xiv. 23. Then, in Rom. viii. 9, we are told 
that it is the Spirit of God that dwells in us. 
"But ye are not in the flesh, but in the 
Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell 
in you." 

" These varying modes of expression," 
writes Dr. Charles Hodge, " find their solu- 
tion in the doctrine of the Trinity. In vir- 
tue of the unity of the divine substance, he 
that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father 
also ; he that hath the Son hath the Father ; 
where the Spirit of God is, there God is, 
and where the Spirit of Christ is, there 
Christ is. The passage in Rom. viii. 9, 10 
is peculiarly instructive. The apostle here 



30 CHRIST L1VETH IN ME. 

says the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. 
Now, if any man have not the Spirit of 
Christ, he is none of his ; and if Christ be 
in you, etc. From this it is plain that Christ 
being in us means that we have his Spirit, 
and to have his Spirit means that the Spirit 
of God dwelleth in us. When, therefore, 
the apostle speaks of Christ dwelling in our 
hearts, he refers to the indwelling of the 
Holy Ghost, for Christ dwells in his people 
by his Spirit." 

But let it be ever borne in mind that the 
Holy Spirit, in his various operations on and 
in, and in his connection with, the believing 
heart, is in a sense pre-eminently the Spirit 
of Christ ! For, 

i. Christ lived and suffered and died to 
secure the coming of the Spirit to man and 
in regenerating, sanctifying power. Bear 
ever in vivid apprehension the truth that 
" no dispensation of the Spirit, no Church," 
no conviction, no conversion, no salvation — 
barren, ever barren, the soil watered even 



CHRIST LIVE TIL IN ME. 3 I 

with the blood of the Son of God — power- 
less, utterly powerless, even the inspired 
word — useless, utterly useless, the whole 
humiliation of Jesus, an utter waste of toils, 
tears, agonies and blood ! On the slopes of 
Olivet, while the cloudy chariot stood wait- 
ing to bear the Conqueror to his throne, he 
charged his disciples not to depart from Je- 
rusalem till the promised Spirit should come, 
"for ye shall be baptized with the Holy 
Ghost not many days hence, and ye shall 
be witnesses unto me to the uttermost parts 
of the earth." 

" No dispensation of the Spirit, no 
Church." " He," writes John Owen, " that 
would utterly separate the Spirit from the 
word had as good burn his Bible. The 
bare letter of the New Testament will no 
more produce faith and obedience in the 
souls of men than the letter of the Old 
Testament does among the Jews." 

Without the coming of the Holy Ghost 
none can be saved. But Christ came to 



32 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

earth as a Saviour, and he died that men 
might be saved. He came, therefore, and 
died to secure the coming of the Holy 
Ghost. Paul, in Galatians iii. 13-14, 
speaks of the "promise of the Spirit." 
This promise of the Spirit means the 
" Spirit promised." This promise of the 
Spirit is to Christ as the reward of his 
work, to make that work effective in the 
salvation of men and the glorification of the 
Son of God. 

2. The Holy Spirit is given to the Church 
in place of the embodied Christ, and he, as 
the Spirit of Christ, is Christ in us. 

His assurance to his disciples was re- 
peated and explicit that he would always 
be with them. Once he said, "Where two 
or three are met together in my name, there 
am I in the midst of them." Then, at the 
close of his bodily sojourn below, he said, 
" Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the 
end of the world." These words, inter- 
preted by those other words of his (John 



CHRIST LIVE Til IX ME. 33 

xiv. 26 and xv. 26) about " the Comforter 
which is the Holy Ghost," shows us that 
when he said " I " in the promise to " two 
or three met in his name/' and in the assur- 
ance that he would be with them alway, he 
meant "my Spirit." For the Holy Ghost is 
the Spirit of Christ. Old Testament proph- 
ecy came from holy men as moved by the 
Holy Ghost. 2 Pet. i. 21. But the Spirit 
that moved these prophets was the Spirit 
of Christ. " Searching what or what man- 
ner of time the Spirit of Christ which was 
in them did signify." 1 Pet. i. 11. 

Thus in the Spirit of Christ dwelling in 
them they had a substitute for the em- 
bodied Christ dwelling without them, and, 
instead of being troubled, they ought to 
have been delighted at the thought of this 
exchange. For it is greatly better to have 
our Saviour in us by his Spirit than to have 
him without us under the bodily eye. We, 
therefore, beloved in the Lord, commit a 
great mistake when we fancy that we are 



34 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

behind the disciples of Jesus' day in bless- 
ing because they could see him with the eye 
of the body whilst we cannot. Nay, we are 
richly blessed beyond them, for we have him 
always in us. 

3. Then as the Holy Ghost is the Spirit 
of Christ, he does the work of Christ. 
He finisheth what Christ began. Garnishing 
the heavens of the new spiritual work, he 
lets the keystone into the arch of triumph, 
bringing forth the headstone, crying, Grace, 
grace unto it. 

" The work of the Son was not his own 
work, but rather the work of the Father 
who sent him." While the sun of his life 
was going down in those dark masses of 
terrific cloud, Jesus lifted his eyes to heaven 
and said, " Father, I have glorified thee on 
the earth, I have finished the work thou 
gavest me to do." "So the work of the 
Spirit is not his own work, but rather the 
work of the Son, by whom he was sent, and 
in whose name he performs it." " Howbeit, 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 35 

when the Spirit of truth is come he will 
guide you into all truth ; for he shall not 
speak of himself, but whatsoever he shall 
hear, that shall he speak ; and he will show 
you things to come. He shall glorify me ; 
for he shall receive of mine, and shall show 
it unto you. All things that the Father 
hath are mine ; therefore said I that he shall 
take of mine and shall show it unto you." 
John xvi. 13-15. 

" He comes to communicate truth, to 
build on the foundation Christ himself has 
laid. He shall not speak of himself — not 
of himself only ; he shall reveal no other 
truth, communicate no other grace, than 
what is in, from and by Christ. It is added, 
' Whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he 
speak/ that is, the whole counsel of the 
Father and the Son concerning the salva- 
tion of the Church/' 

4. His great work is to glorify Christ — 
that is, to clothe him with glory in the view, 
estimation and affections of men, but espe- 



36 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

daily in the mind and heart of the believer. 
He, in the believer, is there to show that be- 
liever all the beauty and glory of Christ. 

5. Then the material, if we may so say, 
with which he works, the truths he shows, 
consist of the things of Christ — all those 
grand truths respecting the nature of his 
person, the offices he fills ; all those touch- 
ing truths respecting his humiliation and 
woes ; all those sweet truths respecting his 
condescension and love; all those sublime 
truths respecting the brilliant inheritance he 
bought for the saints and the fascinating 
scenes at the marriage supper of the Lamb. 
These, O my soul, he is in thee to show 
unto thee and make thee see them in their 
beauty. And better yet than this, the Spirit 
will show thee the Son in his glory. 

Thus it is that Christ is in us — in us by 
his Spirit, the Spirit of God ; omniscient, for 
" he searcheth all things, yea, the deep things 
of God" (1 Cor. ii. 10); omnipotent, for he 
raised Jesus from the dead, and at the blast 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN HIE. 2>7 

of the archangel's trumpet he will also raise 
again our mortal bodies (Rom. viii. 1 1). The 
Spirit that works in the soul all the graces 
of the Holy Ghost, love, joy, peace, long- 
suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meek- 
ness, temperance, — this Spirit is in the be- 
liever as the Spirit of Christ. There he is 
in every soul not reprobate to take Christ's 
things, to take the unsearchable riches of 
Christ and show them to the soul ! 

Better, then, far better, the Christ within, 
under the eye of the soul, than the Christ 
without, under the eye of the body ! 




VI 



^HRIST liveth in me. In these words of 
Paul there is that which is well fitted to 
arrest the believer's attention : " I am cruci- 
fied, if crucified, slain — slain by crucifixion in 
Christ — nevertheless, I live — live, because 
He in whom I was crucified received the 
death-stroke in my stead ; I live, because 
when I was drawn into saving union with 
Christ I became a new creature, and it is 
this new creature that now lives. And yet 
it is not even this new creature as a sep- 
arate, independent being that lives, but 
Christ liveth in me, and the life that I, as 
this new creature, now live in the flesh, I 
live by faith of the Son of God. This life I 
live is the result of a vital energy, imparted 
to my being through the operation of a faith 

38 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 39 

that receives Jesus Christ and rests upon 
him alone for salvation. 

Christ is living in me. They killed him 
on Calvary, but he rose again. He is now- 
alive ! Do you ask where ? In me ! Those 
Roman authorities think they have Saul of 
Tarsus chained and imprisoned here. Men 
never made a greater mistake ! Saul of 
Tarsus died in the highway near Damascus, 
and there he was buried, being baptized by 
the Holy Spirit unto Christ's death, and 
now it is Christ they have here in prison 
and in bonds. Inasmuch as they have done 
it unto me, they have done it unto him. 
When, in Ephesus, they saw one going from 
house to house, warning every one night 
and day with tears, they thought that it was 
Paul they saw. They mistook one for 
another. It was " Christ living in me — 
Christ walking with my feet, speaking, pray- 
ing, with my lips, weeping with my tears." 

Every human being full of the Spirit of 
Christ is in an important sense another 



4-0 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. **-* 

Christ : " Touch not mine anointed ones, 
my Messiahs, my Christs." Jew and Gen- 
tile, scribe and priest, thought they were 
ridding the world for ever of that thorn in 
their side when they thrust that spear into 
his side, but instead of that, as when one 
breaks a mirror he makes a score or two, each 
fragment becoming a separate one, so by 
slaying Christ they made way for a myriad- 
fold multiplication of Christ, and now in 
every Christ-filled soul Christ lives again. 




VII. 



TT is obvious that there is a sense in which 
the verb to live may be equivalent sim- 
ply to the verb to be, to tarry, to stay. On 
the other hand, however, in the language 
and thought of common life, we are wont to 
make a wide distinction in meaning between 
these terms. "Do you live here?" "No, I 
am only staying." With the latter word as 
thus used we often associate, in addition to 
the idea of transient abode, the ideas of re- 
luctance, discomfort, constraint, want of wel- 
come or want of congeniality in the associa- 
tions and surroundings. But with the word 
living we as often associate ideas of com- 
fort, prosperity, delight, sweetness of inter- 
course, domestic joys. "That husband, wife 
and their happy little ones live there. " 



41 



42 CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 

Like distinctions may legitimately be 
made between these and similar terms em- 
ployed of the kingdom of heaven, of Christ 
and the soul. Christ, in a sense, lives, 
dwells in that erring, dull-spirited, half-dead, 
half-alive believer loitering along the way, 
at ease in Zion, lounging on bed of ivory, 
stretching the frame upon the soft couch, 
eating the lambs out of the flock and the 
calves out of the midst of the stall, chanting 
to the sound of the viol and inventing to 
himself instruments of music like David, 
drinking wine in bowls and anointing him- 
self with the chief ointments ; but who is 
not grieved for the afflictions of Joseph, in 
that one, also, who, like Peter, is following 
Jesus afar off, in that one, like Philip, full 
of gross misapprehensions of the truth, say- 
ing, "Show us the Father, and it suffereth 
us!" in that believer to whom, for the time, 
the word of God is unattractive, prayer a 
task and burden, to whom the Sabbath is a 
weariness, who is censorious, unkind, penu- 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 43 

rious, nay, even in the believer who has for 
the time wandered far away into sin and 
shame ! If that one is not a reprobate, 
Christ is in him, and wherever he is he lives, 
and wherever he lives he dwells, and thus, in 
a sense, it may be said that Christ lives, 
dwells, in that shamefully-erring soul. But 
in how different a sense does Christ live in 
that one whose face shines with a constant 
light from off the mercy-seat ; who hails with 
delight the hourof secret prayer ; who feeds 
luxuriantly on the word of God as on the 
manna of heaven, saying, " Thy words were 
found and I did eat them, and thy word was 
unto me the joy and rejoicing of my heart ;" 
who sings, "As the hart panteth after 
water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, 
O God ;" who is careful for nothing, but in 
everything by prayer and thanksgiving 
makes his requests known to God, and in 
whose heart resides the peace that passeth 
understanding ! 

Now, when Paul wrote of himself, " Christ 



44 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 



liveth in me," his words spoke of a frame of 
mind indefinitely higher than that of mere 
conscious security under the shield of justi- 
fication. By the term liveth here he cer- 
tainly expressed quite another thought than 
that conveyed in the simple verb of exist- 
ence. 




VIII 



fT is obviously possible that one be in 
Christ without any vivid apprehension 
of the fact on the part of the believer, and 
equally possible that Christ be in the soul 
without any vivid consciousness that he is 
there. 

Initial union with Christ is the work of 
the Holy Ghost, and it repeats itself in our 
consciousness only through certain conse- 
quent acts of our own — acts of recognition 
and of response to his loving embrace — and 
the period may be longer or shorter be- 
tween the actual union and the self-con- 
scious recognition of that union on the part 
of the soul. One of our pastors expresses 
it as his opinion that there are more Chris- 
tians out of the Church than there are hyp- 



45 



46 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

ocrites in it. But many, if not most, if not 
even all, of these Christians out of the Church 
still remain there just because the Christ 
within is not recognized. We have known 
men and women out of the Church for 
years, respecting whose piety we harbored 
no shadow of doubt. Christ was in them, 
they were in Christ, and yet they were un- 
able to recognize the truth. 

Then this consciousness, once in posses- 
sion, may be temporarily lost, and the soul 
may droop and sigh, "Oh that I knew 
where I might find him, that I might come 
even to his seat ! Behold, I go forward, but 
he is not there, and backward, but I cannot 
perceive him; on the left hand where he 
doth work, but I cannot behold him: he 
hideth himself on the right hand, that I 
cannot see him." 

Our psalmody abundantly testifies to this 
phase of Christian experience : 

« Where is the blessedness I knew 
When first I saw the Lord ? 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 47 

Where is the soul-refreshing view 
Of Jesus and his word ? 

« What peaceful hours I once enjoyed ! 
How sweet their memory still ! 
But they have left an aching void 
The world can never fill. 

« Return, O holy Dove, return, 
Sweet messenger of rest ! 
I hate the sins that made thee mourn 
And drove thee from my breast." 

Were it not the case that this union 
might exist — Christ in the soul, the soul in 
Christ — and yet the human member in this 
union be either altogether ignorant or in very 
serious doubt of the reality, there were no 
room for the injunction, " Examine your- 
selves whether ye be in the faith; prove 
your own selves. Know ye not your own 
selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you ex- 
cept ye be reprobates ?" 

On the other hand, there are times in the 
experience of many, we suppose of most, of 
God's people, in which Christ is so obvi- 
ously within that there is no need of exam- 



48 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

ination to ascertain the truth, or to reassure 
the soul of his residence there. When Paul 
wrote to Timothy, "I know whom I have 
believed, and am persuaded that he is able 
to keep that which I have committed to him 
against that day. I am now ready to be 
offered, and the time of my departure is at 
hand. I have fought a good fight, I have 
finished my course, I have kept the faith; 
henceforth there is laid up for me a crown 
of righteousness which the Lord, the right- 
eous Judge, shall give me at that day ;" and 
when he wrote to the Romans, " I am per- 
suaded that neither life, nor death, nor 
angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor 
things present, nor things to come, nor 
height, nor depth, nor any other creature, 
shall be able to separate us from the love 
of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord," — 
surely he had little need to examine himself 
to find a Saviour present there ! And when 
the saintly McCheyne wrote, " Oh how 
sweet to work all day for God and then to 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 49 

lie down under his smiles ! Preached on, 
1 1 know that my Redeemer liveth ' — very 
sweet and precious to myself, kept in per- 
fect peace ; happy to be one with Christ." 
And when David Brainard wrote, " My soul 
was this day, at turns, sweetly set on God ; 
I longed to be with hi7n that I might behold 
his glory. I felt sweetly disposed to com- 
mit all to him, even my dearest friends, my 
dearest flock, my absent brother and all my 
concerns for time and eternity. Oh that 
his kingdom might come in the world, that 
they might alHove and glorify him for what 
he is in himself, and that the blessed Re- 
deemer might see of the travail of his soul, 
and be satisfied ! Oh come, Lord Jesus, 
come quickly !" And when Hewitson said, 
" Meditate much on the love of Christ : it is 
a wonderful love ! I love him with my whole 
heart ! I long to be with my Beloved !" 
And when Hedley Vicars wrote, " In Jesus 
I find all I w r ant of happiness, and as week 
after week and month after month roll by 



50 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

I believe he is becoming more and more 
lovely in my eyes and precious to my soul/' 
And when Henry Martyn wrote, "Thine I 
am ; my Beloved is mine, and I am his ; and 
now I want none but thee. I am alone with 
thee in this world ; and when I put off this 
mortal tabernacle I shall still be with 
thee." And when the seraphic Rutherford 
wrote, "That worthy, worthy Prince Jesus ! 
Oh, who can weigh him ! Ten thousand, 
thousand heavens would not be one scale 
of the balance to lay him in ! Oh black 
angels in comparison of him ! Oh dim and 
dark and lightless sun in regard of that fair 
Sun of Righteousness ! Oh feckless and 
worthless heavens of heavens, when they 
stand beside my worthy and lofty and high 
and excellent well beloved," — when these 
" God-souls " thus wrote, they saw, without 
search or inquiry, the indwelling Christ in 
his beauty. 

And we understand the apostle to say in 
the words, " Christ liveth in me," not merely, 



CHRIST LIVE TH IN ME. 5 I 

" He is in me," for he is in the most sluggish 
and worldly-minded Christian ; not merely, 
" He is in me in all the fullness of his Mes- 
siahship," but, " As such he lives in my per- 
ceptions, in my consciousness, in my heart, 
in my volitions ; as such he is in me as a 
stirring, vigorous, glorious life, is in me as 
an ever-acting, mightily-acting vitality, is in 
me to fill me with his fullness and replenish 
my every grace from the stores of his un- 
failing grace." 

For to him to live was Christ; he lived 
Christ. In Paul, Christ lived again in the 
world. 

In writing to the Galatians (iii. 19) the 
apostle had his eye on the same general 
idea of an in-living Christ. They had so 
far receded from their early faith as to have 
lapsed into exceedingly obscured views 
even of justification. And now the apos- 
tle says, "I am in great anguish on your 
account, and my anguish will not be re- 
moved until Christ he formed within you " — 



52 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

not among them in the aggregate, but in 
each of the aggregate. But unless they 
were reprobates, Christ was in each of them 
by the mystical tie that made them one with 
him. Hence, he agonized for something 
more than this, even that the Christ within 
might take such form before their spiritual 
vision as to be seen by them as what he 
was — to wit, their justification full and com- 
plete, and their sanctification also. To this 
there was needed no change in Christ, but 
a change in them ; no introduction of Christ 
into their souls, but an introduction of Christ 
into their vision, that, seeing him as he was, 
they might exclaim with Thomas, " My Lord 
and my God !" Thus Christ would not only 
be, but live, in them. 

To the Colossians (i. 27) he speaks of 
" Christ in you the hope of glory " — not the 
cause of hope, nor the author of hope, nor 
the object of hope, but the very matter and 
substance of hope. He was among the 
Colossians to be proclaimed to them as an 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME, 53 

object of hope, but he was in them a hope 
of glory. 

Now, the presence of Christ in one as his 
actual hope of glory implies that Christ is, 
as it were, interwoven among the hopes of 
the soul, that the hopes are now in actual, 
vigorous, exhilarating exercise. Hope is 
desire coupled with expectation. I may 
desire a thing without expecting it ; I may 
expect a thing without desiring it ; but 
when I expect and desire the same object, I 
have hope. The object of this mingled ex- 
pectation and desire is glory. Glory is that 
one word that covers all exaltation, all fe- 
licity. Whatever heaven is and has for the 
ransomed soul, that is this glory. And here 
is a soul that is now enjoying the Christ 
within as the hope of that glory to come ! 
Surely this one may say, what many a be- 
liever many a time cannot say, " Christ liv- 
eth in me /" 

The same is the drift of the passage in 
the epistle to the Ephesians, i. 15-20. In 



54 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

this passage the apostle addresses true be- 
lievers, those that are already in Christ, 
" the saints at Ephesus, the faithful in Christ 
Jesus." 

They are not only Christians in fact, but 
even more or less noted for piety. During 
the five or six years of Paul's absence from 
them they had been growing in grace, and 
word had reached him through others of 
their faith in the Lord Jesus and their love 
to the saints. 

Now, for these advanced and somewhat 
mature Christians, Paul asks something 
more. What more ? Why, " the Spirit of 
wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of 
him," a farther and fuller manifestation of 
" the nature or excellence of the things of 
God ;" a spirit of wisdom or insight into the 
mysteries of religion, that the eyes of their 
heart might be enlightened, their spiritual 
vision made more keen, that they may per- 
ceive more clearly the " nature and value of 
the hope" which the effectual calling of 



CHRIST LIVE TH IN ME. 55 

the Holy Spirit has wrought in them, and 
perceive more clearly the nature and value 
of the inheritance for which they hope and 
what is the exceeding o-reatness of the 
power to usward — power bearing on us ; 
power ready to work in us for the realiza- 
tion in our experience of that for which he 
prays ; power ready to increase their spirit- 
ual wisdom, to enlarge their spiritual know- 
ledge, to sharpen their spiritual eyesight, 
and thus to enable them more and more to 
compass in their apprehensions the hope 
that was within them and the object of that 
hope as it lay before them ! This pow r er, 
waiting to do all this for them and in them, 
was none other than that which had raised 
Jesus from the dead, and had also created 
them anew in Christ Jesus, and now, in all 
its magnitude, it is still to usward who are 
believing to do all this ! 

These Ephesians were in Christ and 
Christ was in these Ephesians, and they 
knew that Christ was in them. They had 



56 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

made good progress in the divine life, but 
there was something better in store for 
them, and for this Paul was praying. And 
so many of them as recognized the mighty 
power lying within them, ready to work its 
will in them and uniting in prayer with the 
apostle for its operation, realized in their ex- 
perience the consequent increase of wisdom, 
knowledge of spiritual mysteries, illumina- 
tion of spiritual eyesight, discernment of the 
nature and preciousness of the hope in them 
and the object of that hope without them, — 
they too could say with loud-tongued em- 
phasis, " Christ liveth in us !" 

And then that marvelous passage in the 
third chapter of this epistle, beginning with 
Eph. iii. 14: "For this cause I bow my 
knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven 
and earth is named, that he would grant you, 
according to the riches of his glory, to be 
strengthened with might by his Spirit in the 
inner man, that Christ may dwell in your 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. S7 

hearts by faith, that ye, being rooted and 
grounded in love, may be able to compre- 
hend with all saints what is the breadth and 
length and depth and height, and to know 
the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, 
that ye might be filled with all the fullness 
of God." 

Here, again, the verb " dwell," like the 
verb " liveth," must express an idea much 
more vivid and forcible than the verb " to 
be," and imply more than merely that in- 
being of Christ which is common to all 
Christians. For, 

i. This prayer is offered in behalf of 
Christians somewhat mature (i. 15). It is 
offered for them because they are Christians. 
"For this cause" (v. 14), that is, as the por- 
tion from the first to the thirteenth verses 
inclusive forms a parenthesis, because " ye are 
built upon the foundation of the apostles and 
prophets, I bow my knees and plead for 
this blessing." And as Christ is actually in 
all Christians, Paul could not pray that he 



5 8 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

might be in the Ephesian Christians. For 
we never pray for the actual, but only for 
the non-actual, never for the necessary, but 
only for the contingent ; we never ask God 
to give us what he has already given us, 
to do what we see him actually doing, nor 
for a thing which we actually have in pos- 
session. Nor do we pray that the sun 
may shine on a clear day, that gravitation 
may draw, that water may run down hill. 
But this were just as rational as to pray that 
Christ may be in a believer, for one cannot 
be a believer without Christ being in him. 

2. Then Paul prays that Christ may dwell 
in them " by faith." 

But he could not pray that Christ might 
be in them by faith, for faith is the fruit and 
not the root of union with Christ. Faith is 
the first-born, not the parent, of regenera- 
tion. Union with Christ is effected by the 
operation of the Holy Ghost imparting to 
the soul the life of Christ, and faith brings 
the fact of this union to the consciousness 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 59 

of the soul, and this consciousness is kept 
up by the operation of faith. 

3. Further, by common Scripture usage, 
the word " dwells," when employed with re- 
spect to God, signifies a special manifesta- 
tion of his presence, and it was for this 
special manifestation that Paul prayed. 

In the beautiful language of Dr. Charles 
Hodge, " Everything is full of God. An in- 
sect, a flower, is a constant manifestation of 
his presence and power. It is what it is be- 
cause God is in it. So of the human soul, 
it is said to be full of God when its inward 
state, its affections and acts are determined 
and controlled by him, so as to be a con- 
stant manifestation of the divine presence. 
Then the soul is pure, and glorious, and free, 
and blessed. This is what God promises 
when he says, I will dwell in you and walk 
in you." 

11 Thus saith the high and lofty One whose 
home is eternity," outside of the successions 
and changes of time, whose name is holy, 



60 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

"I dwell in the high and holy place ;" this 
high and holy place is heaven. " Look down 
from heaven, and behold from the habitation 
of thy holiness and of thy glory." Isa. lxiii. 
15. But heaven is heaven because of the 
special manifestation there of God. Therein 
is no temple, for the Lord God Almighty 
and the Lamb are the temple of it. It had 
no need of sun or moon to shine in it, for 
the glory of God did lighten it and the 
Lamb is the light thereof. Now, this same 
God of glory, present in every star and 
flower and in every creature, dwells also 
with him that is of a contrite and humble 
spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and 
revive the heart of the contrite ones. And 
Paul, in praying for his Ephesian converts, 
already among the believing in Christ Jesus, 
already noted for faith in Christ and love to 
the saints, in each one of whom Christ 
already was by mystic alliance, asked as an 
additional blessing that Christ might " dwell 
in their hearts by faith." 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 6 1 

4. The same is farther obvious from the 
textual connection. 

The apostle prays that God, " according 
to the riches of his glory " — mark the standi 
ard ! " according to the abundance and plen- 
itude of his perfections, ,, in some propor- 
tion to the wealth of power, mercy and 
love that resides in the bosom of God ! — 
11 that he would grant you to be strength- 
ened with might by his Spirit in the inner 
man ;" that God would impart his own 
strength to that inner man, the new creature 
in Christ Jesus ; that he would in accordance 
with the plenitude of his perfections make 
effective upon and within that inner man 
that exceeding greatness of power to us- 
ward who are believing, i. 29. And now 
the result of this mighty strengthening of 
this inner man is " the indwelling of Christ 
in the heart by faith." Christ is in every 
Christian heart, but if he dwells there in 
this higher sense, then there has been and 
is a mighty strengthening, a strengthening 



62 CHRIST LIVE TH IN ME. 

according to the riches of God's glory, in the 
inner man by the Spirit of God ! 

Then follows the fruit of this indwelling, 
the state of mind that must ensue upon this 
indwelling, a condition that consists in 
"being rooted and grounded in love, ,, a 
state of " fixedness and foundation in 
love," thorough penetration with the spirit 
of love. A plant drinks through its whole 
frame and forms into leaves and fruit the 
water-moistened soil in which it is rooted, 
and a soul that is rooted in love will drink 
love through its roots and through all its 
frame, and there will be love to God, Father, 
Son and Holy Ghost, as he is in himself so 
far as revelation discloses him to the eye 
of faith, and as he is in all the creatures of 
his hands — skies and fields, stars and 
flowers — and more still as he is in those 
creatures made in his image, though now 
the image be so sadly marred, and higher 
still as he is in those who have been by the 
Holy Ghost created anew in Jesus Christ, 



CHRIST LIVE TIT IN ME. 63 

and highest of all as he is in those most like 
him, those in whom Jesus dwells, lives, 
beaming in the eye, glowing in the visage, 
sparkling in the life. 

The foundation of a building is that to 
which it clings with all the force of its own 
pressing weight, that without which it is a 
ruin. And a result of this indwelling is the 
grounding, or rather founding, of the soul 
on love, in love, so that love is its life, its 
existence. 

And now an accompaniment of this con- 
dition in love is the ability to comprehend 
and appreciate "what is the length, and 
breadth, and depth, and height, of even the 
whole love of Christ, a love that passeth 
knowledge !" Rooted and grounded in, and 
therefore penetrated and permeated by, love, 
the soul is able to comprehend somewhat of 
the love that Christ displayed in exchang- 
ing the riches of heaven for the poverty of 
earth, the glory of heaven for the humilia- 
tion of earth, the happiness of heaven for 



64 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

the miseries of earth, that we might pass 
from the miseries, humiliation and poverty 
of earth to the felicities, glories and riches 
of heaven. For none but a loving heart is 
capable of appreciating love. That cold, icy, 
phlegmatic soul looks with disgust upon de- 
monstrative affection — that warm-hearted, 
affectionate spirit sees with admiration the 
clinging of hand to hand and heart to heart. 
Thus, root and ground one in spiritual love, 
and, as the artist gazes on field, on forest, on 
sunset beauty, so will that one gaze and gaze 
on the love of Jesus for dying man ! This 
admiration will take a turn of peculiar ex- 
quisiteness as it thrills along the chords of 
responsive affection ! " We love him be- 
cause he first loved us !•'•■ And it is this lov- 
ing look again, this love that re-echoes love, 
that teaches us in high tuition the nature of 
the love that calls forth our love. 

Thus a result of the indwelling of Christ 
for which Paul prayed is ability to compre- 
hend, as all saints ought to seek to compre- 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 65 

hend it, the love of Christ that passes com- 
prehension ! 

"The object of this knowledge/' writes 
Dr. Charles Hodge, " is infinite. ' It is high 
as heaven ; what canst thou do ? Deeper 
than hell ; what canst thou know ? The 
measure thereof is longer than the earth 
and broader than the sea/ This language 
is used by Job to express the infinitude of 
God. The apostle employs a similar mode 
of representation to indicate the boundless 
nature of the object of the believer's know- 
ledge. To know r what is infinite, and which 
therefore passes knowledge, can only mean 
to have some due appreciation of its nature 
and the fact that it is infinite. It is only 
thus that we can know space, immensity, 
eternity or God. Paul, therefore, would 
have us understand that the subject of 
which he speaks has a length and breadth, 
a depth and height, which pass all under- 
standing. It is the love of Christ to us 
which passeth knowledge, and, though it 



66 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

surpasses the power of our understanding 
to comprehend, it is still a subject of exper- 
imental knowledge. We may know how 
excellent, how wonderful, how free, how dis- 
interested, how long-suffering, how manifold 
and constant it is, and that it is infinite, 
and this is the highest and most sanctifying 
of all knowledge. " 

But this indwelling of Christ for which 
Paul prays not only endows with the ability 
to know to the largest measure possible to 
the saint on earth this infinite love of Christ, 
but this comprehension of that love fills the 
soul with all " the fullness of God." 

"The fullness of God" means, not the 
attributes of God, which are in their nature 
incommunicable to the creature, but the 
moral qualities of God. The fullness of 
God is that with which God is filled — wis- 
dom, mercy, love, joy, peace, long-suffering, 
gentleness, goodness, fidelity. And Paul 
prays that we may be filled with this full- 
ness. And the door, as it were, through 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 6j 

which this fullness is borne, is our compre- 
hension of the love of Christ. Unbelief 
shuts that door. Faith, which "worketh 
by love," opens that door: a strong faith 
opens it wide, a feeble faith a little way. 
When we gain a reasonable comprehension 
of Christ's love to us, all unbelief disappears, 
and there takes its place a full persuasion 
that heaven, having given the greater, will 
not withhold the lesser, and this faith 
throws open the door to all the fullness 
of God. 

To seize the mind of the Spirit in these 
words, " the fullness of God," it is of the 
utmost importance to note that the result 
expressed in them is a result sought for in 
this world. For we cannot conceive of the 
apostle praying so ardently for an object 
which was sure to be reached, whether he 
or anybody else prayed for it or not. Christ 
is in every member of the visible Church 
who is not a reprobate, and that one in 
whom as a branch of the Vine, Christ is, 



68 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

will, beyond all peradventure, find his way 
to heaven, and there, in the highest sense 
possible to the creature, be filled with all the 
fullness of God. No ; Paul was praying for 
a contingency, not a certainty — for an object 
that might or might not be. Therefore this 
fullness of God which Paul prayed for is a 
fullness which he hoped that those Ephesian 
Christians might enjoy in Ephesus, and also 
the faithful in Christ Jesus in any land where, 
in any age, they might live. As Olshausen 
and Ellicott agree, " Where Christ, the liv- 
ing Son of God, dwells " — that is, in the sense 
of Paul in his prayer for this indwelling — 
^ there surely the whole fullness of God is 
already/' For in Christ dwells all the full- 
ness of the Godhead bodily, and Christ with 
all this fullness is in each believer, and 
when he not only is but lives, dwells there, 
then that one, in proportion to the fullness 
of this indwelling, is filled with this fullness. 
Therefore we are to apply here the limit 
that is applied alone to our comprehension 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 69 

of the love of Christ. We are incapable of 
knowing what passeth knowledge. We can 
know only so far as our spiritual and finite 
powers reach. Up to the point of our abil- 
ity to know such things, we may, through 
the mighty strengthening of the Holy 
Ghost, know the love that in the wide reach 
of its comprehensiveness exceeds the com- 
plete grasp of finite powers. And so here 
that fullness of God for which Paul prayed 
was the fullness possible to the soul on 
earth, redeemed, regenerated and occupied 
by an indwelling Christ. 

In other words, Paul prayed for the Ephe- 
sians, and for us, that they and we might be 
so girded up with spiritual life and energy 
in the inner man that we should feel Christ 
dwelling in us — that, fully imbued with love 
ourselves, we might, as far as the finite could 
compass the infinite, compass in our appre- 
hensions the love of Christ to our souls ; 
and that in this appreciation of his love, and 
in the loving response which his perceived 



70 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

love to us would call out toward him, we 
might be filled as full of God as is possible 
to a believer while yet living in the flesh ! 
" Filled even as God is full, each in your de- 
gree, but all to your utmost capacity, with 
divine wisdom, and might, and love." — Al- 
ford. 




IX, 



T T ERE, then, is a Christian soul. This 
soul has been introduced into Christ 
by the Spirit of God in the act of regenera- 
tion, and now to it, in Christ, there is no 
condemnation. That soul being in Christ, 
Christ is also in that soul. He is there by 
his Spirit, and in that Spirit he is there, clad 
in all the virtues of his holy nature, fur- 
nished with all the treasures of his complete 
obedience and atoning agonies. But, as 
there, he is visible only to the eye of re- 
newed nature, which is faith, and visible to 
that eye in proportion to the clearness, the 
keenness of its vision. And now a mighty 
strengthening of the inner man by the Spirit 
within floods Christ with a blaze of light 
(for it is the Spirit's great work to show 

71 



J2 CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 

Christ to the soul), imparts new powers of 
spiritual vision, and now the Christ who is 
in every Christian soul lives in this Chris- 
tian soul ! He lives, dwells by faith, through 
faith, faith the door, as it were, through which 
Christ finds way, not into the soul, but into 
the active life of the soul ! 

And now may this one say, not only with 
truth, but with a precious fullness of mean- 
ing, " Christ liveth in me !" Christ in all the 
holiness of his being, in all the virtues of his 
Messiahship, Christ that had glory with the 
Father before the world was, without whom 
not anything was made that was made, who 
is the brightness of the Father's glory and 
the express image of his person, that .was 
born in that stall, cradled in that manger, 
that kept in letter and in spirit all the pre- 
cepts of the law, that his own self bore all 
its penalty, that was prostrate in the garden, 
hanged upon the cross, shut up and sealed 
in the sepulchre, that rose again from the 
dead and ascended on high, leading cap- 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 73 

tivity captive, whence he shall come again 
to judge the quick and the dead, — this 
Christ, with all he is and all he has, with all 
the virtues of that soul-healing balm com- 
pounded of the bitter herbs of his woes and 
the sweet herbs of his graces and holy obe- 
dience — this Christ, by his Holy Spirit in 
me, living in me, and having already applied 
that atoning balm for my pardon and ac- 
ceptance with God — is now ready, every 
moment, at a glance of the pleading eye of 
faith, to apply it afresh for every sin. 

This Christ lives in me, able and willing 
to do for and in me all that I need to have 
done— to restrain, to stimulate, to purify. 
He liveth in me, in my perceptions, in my 
thoughts, in my affections, in my volitions, 
in all the exercises and issues of my mental, 
moral, religious life. 

This it is in a high, scriptural sense to 
have Christ living in us. It is to have him 
ever before the eye as our Prophet to point 
us out our way, a pillar of cloud by day and 



74 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

of fire by night, a voice in the ear, " This is 
the way, walk thou in it," when we turn to 
the right hand or to the left ; to make our 
heart burn within us as he talks with us by 
the way, discoursing to us, in language 
sweeter than angels use, of pardon and 
peace and heaven ; to have him ever in our 
consciousness as our Priest, ever applying 
the atoning balm, ever ready on the instant 
when we are assailed by the tempter to 
thrust the evil one aside, ever ready, if we 
be surprised into sin of thought, word, deed, 
omission, commission, to receive our confes- 
sion and reassure us of our freedom from 
penal wrath and of our fresh acceptance 
and reconciliation with the Father ; to have 
him with us as our consciously recognized 
King, who, having in regeneration subdued 
us unto himself, drawn us by the cords of 
love, made us willing in the day of his 
power, is now ready through the sanctifying 
influences of his presence and grace to rule 
in and reign over every power of our be- 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 75 

ing. It is to live in constant, conscious ac- 
ceptance of him, in his person and offices ; 
to confide in him from moment to moment 
for everything needful in temporal and 
spiritual things; to recognize him as ever 
at hand, and able to do exceeding abun- 
dantly above all that we ask or think accord- 
ing to the power that worketh in us. This 
were to have Christ living in us. 



X. 

T3EHIND yonder screen a great picture 
is hidden. It is the work of a well- 
known and highly-gifted artist. Years of 
anxious thought and careful toil have been 
spread in light and shade, lines and colors, 
upon that canvas. A great company is 
assembled to witness its unveiling, and ex- 
pectation is eager and large. But as yet 
there is little emotion in the minds of that 
waiting crowd. They are sure indeed that 
a great picture is there, but just what it is, 
just what the artist has done with his sub- 
ject, no one yet knows. 

And now the withdrawal of the curtain 
discloses all the horrors and glories, woes 
and fascinations, of an awful battle scene — 
a battle in which the life of a nation was 

76 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. J J 

won ; horses, their necks clothed with thun- 
der, the glory of their nostrils terrible, say- 
ing among the trumpets, "Ha! ha!" and 
man, the very poetry of himself, high-strung 
nerve, mightily-knitted muscle, brows full 
of soul, brows full of wrath, bayonets 
crossed, muskets leveled at the breast, the 
descending sabre-stroke, bullet-hail like the 
besom of death, screech and thunder of 
bursting shell, shout and shriek, yell and 
ghastly death, the native clay 

" Covered thick with other clay, heaped and pent, 
Rider and horse, friend and foe, in one red burial blent." 

As soon as the eye takes well in the 
scene, the nerves tremble under an oppres- 
sive thrill and the pent-up feeling takes 
voice in thundering huzzas! That picture 
now is not only near, but it is in, those spec- 
tators ! Not only is it in, but it lives in, 
them. Before in their presence, now it is in 
them. They knew that it was there, but now 
they know what is there. They are no 
longer mere spectators of the picture, but 



78 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

rather its subjects, for it has taken posses- 
sion of them. It has mastered them ! 

Here is a believer. Under the tuition of 
the Holy Ghost the spiritual apathy of other 
days gave place to spiritual anxiety, to con- 
viction of sin, and this has been followed by 
regeneration, faith and repentance. Union 
with Christ has come/ pardon has come, ac- 
ceptance with God has come. That one is 
now in Christ, he is a member of his body. 
Christ is in that one, so that he who lays a 
finger on that believer lays it on Jesus 
Christ. But in this believer that Christ is 
closely veiled from view. Very weak in 
faith, he barely " trusts, hopes, that Christ is 
in him and he in Christ. ,, He would not 
dare affirm that he has passed from death 
unto life. Indeed, he often seriously doubts 
whether all his religious experience has not 
been a mere dream. True, he vividly re- 
calls the acuteness of his conviction of sin 
and the season of comparative peace of 
mind that followed. He has made profes- 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 79 

sion of his faith, has gone into the death- 
chamber where lay the shrouded body of his 
Lord, and laying one hand on that clay-cold 
forehead and lifting the other up to heaven, 
he has sworn before angels and men the 
oath that has laden him with vows which 
will look him in the face at the judgment 
bar. Yet, after all, he is not sure that the 
oath was not the vehicle of spiritual perjury, 
he is not sure that he may not be one of the 
reprobates in whom Christ is not ! 

But one day, in the closet or in the place 
of social prayer, while meditating on the 
w r ord of God, during a revival of religion, 
it may be, or at the communion-table, God 
answered on him and in him the prayer 
Paul put up eighteen hundred years ago, 
and the new man within him was penetrated 
through all its being with a new vital energy. 
The Holy Ghost with his strong, loving arm 
tore down the intervening veil of unbelief, 
of worldliness, of ignorance or erroneous- 
ness of view, imparted a new vision-power 



80 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

to the eye and poured a new flood of light 
upon the so long half-hidden Christ within ! 
Now that believer sees, as he never saw be- 
fore, a present, living Christ, his Prophet, 
Priest and King, his wisdom, righteousness, 
sanctification and redemption — everything a 
poor human soul can need ! And now 
surely that soul can say, " Christ liveth in 
me /" 

Surely something like this came to the 
apostles at Pentecost. Previous to that 
great day their minds were blinded by many 
and gross misapprehensions. At one time 
we find them half quarreling among them- 
selves about precedence in the kingdom 
soon to reward their protracted humiliation 
and self-denial. Mark ix. 34. Then, their 
worldly ambition taking fire at the assur- 
ance (Matt. xix. 28), "Ye which have fol- 
lowed me in the regeneration, when the Son 
of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, 
ye also shall sit upon the twelve thrones 
judging the twelve tribes of Israel," James 



CHRIST LIVE Til TV ME. 8 1 

and John put their mother forward to ask 
for them, the one that he might sit on the 
right hand of the King and the other on 
the left, as chief officers in the realm ! 

Even at the Last Supper what a tone of 
sadness and disappointment is there in the 
reply of Jesus to the strongly gross, earthy 
demand of Philip : " Show us the Father, 
and it sufficeth us " — " Have I been so 
long time with you, and yet hast thou not 
known me, Philip ?" And in passing we 
cannot forbear asking if there be not many 
at our communion-tables to whom this sad 
question comes with a too pungent fitness : 
11 Have I been so long time with you, in you, 
in you by my Spirit, and yet how little have 
you known of me, of my glory, of my power 
to youward, of my love!" 

And later even than the time of the Sup- 
per, even after the resurrection and just on 
the eve of the ascension, as they stand to- 
gether on the eastern slope of Olivet, hear 
them, their minds still fascinated with the 



82 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

glitter of his throne of glory and the twelve 
thrones which they were to occupy, asking, 
" Lord, wilt thou not at this time restore 
again the kingdom to Israel ?" 

But at Pentecost the promise was fulfilled, 
" Ye shall receive power after that the Holy 
Ghost is come upon you/' Paul may have 
had this very promise in mind when he 
wrote, "I bow my knees that ye may be 
strengthened with might by the Spirit in the 
inner man." And they were then strength- 
ened with might, and Christ began to dwell 
anew in their hearts by faith. From that 
time they were other men than they had 
ever been before. That Peter who grew 
pale and trembled when questioned by a 
servant-maid, now, with the heroism of a 
martyr, charges it on the authorities : " This 
Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God 
among you, by miracles and wonders and 
signs which God did by him in the midst of 
you, as ye yourselves know, ye have taken, 
and with wicked hands have crucified and 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME, 83 

slain." And to the very faces of the rulers 
in the Sanhedrim he boldly repeated the 
charge. 

Some such baptism of the Spirit and 
revelation of Christ in him came to Rev. 
Thomas Halyburton in that "Outgate" he 
"got about the close of January 1698." 

" I cannot be very positive about the day 
or hour of this deliverance, nor can I satisfy 
many other questions about the way and 
manner of it. He revealed Christ and his 
glory. I now with wonder beheld his glory 
— the glory as of the only begotten of the 
Father, full of grace and truth. ... I saw 
with wonder and delight, in some measure, 
how God might be just in justifying even the 
ungodly. How was I ravished with delight 
when made to see that God . . . might not 
only pardon, but be just even in justifying 
the ungodly! . . . When this strange dis- 
covery was made of a relief, my soul was 
by a strange and sweet power carried out 
to rest in it. There was a light in God's 



84 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

words to me like a summer s sun. It was 
composing ; it did not, like a flash of light- 
ning, suddenly appear and fill the soul only 
with amazement and fear, but it composed 
and quieted my soul, and put all my facul- 
ties in a due posture, as it were. . . . This 
glorious discovery was very surprising, and 
filled me with wonder. Often was I made 
to stand and wonder what this strange sight 
meant. This discovery, while it lasted, was 
full of ravishing sweetness. . . . This discov- 
ery and manifestation was of a much longer 
continuance and far more bright than any I 
ever since got, for it shone in its brightness 
for about ten days' time, and for long after 
that was not quite off. 

" During this period," he continues, " the 
Lord taught me more than by all my study 
I had learned before. Every day I was 
surprised by some new and unthought-of 
discovery of the Lord. My mind was 
almost wholly taken up about spiritual 
things ; my heart was enlarged, and I saw 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 85 

the way of God's commandments with de- 

light." 

Surely, during this glorious period of re- 
ligious experience, Halyburton could well 
say, " Christ liveth in me !" 

By Dr. Wm. Gordon also this strength- 
ening with might by God's Spirit in the in- 
ner man, this indwelling of Christ, this living 
of Christ within, was enjoyed, when he said, 
"I have an argument I defy all the world to 
refute. Jesus Christ here in my heart fills 
me with peace and joy, and enables me to 
hate sin and love holiness. Talk as you 
like, you can never shake me, for I feel him 
within me / 

" There is nothing to fear if you keep close 
to Jesus. I'll tell you what I did. I went 
fervently to him, and took all my sins and 
cares, my heart full, and left all at the cross, 
and sweet peace followed. Thus go to 
Christ, and you have nothing else to do. 
It's all done for y on. 

" I see where Christians are wrong. We 



86 CHRIST LIVE TH IN ME. 

do not make a co7npanion of God. We 
should treat him more as a friend — not as a 
distant friend, but as always near, close to 
us, so that we are never alone, but contin- 
ually in his company," 

Christ was living in Summerfield when he 
could say, "The Lord caused all his good- 
ness to pass before me and revealed to me 
his name. I felt him passing by. He put 
his hand on me, and then revealed his glory ; 
he covered me ; I was lost in the ocean of 
his goodness." Again he writes, 

" I often feel at a loss to say w r hether I 
am in the body or out of the body. I had 
a sweet season this morning." 

In Dr. Edward Payson, too, Christ was 
living when he wrote, " New joys, new 
praises ! Had a most ravishing view of 
Christ this morning, as coming at a distance 
in his chariot of salvation. In an instant he 
was with me and around me, and I could 
only cry, i Welcome, welcome, a thousand 
times welcome, to my disconsolate heart and 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 87 

to thy widowed Church ! Oh joy unspeak- 
able and full of glory ! While seeing him 
not I feel and believe his presence." 
Again he says, 

"Enjoyed great nearness to Christ in 
family prayer. Yearned to feel a perfect 
union with him, and to love w r ith a most in- 
tense love everything that is dear to him. 
Christians seemed inexpressibly dear to me, 
and I loved to pray for them as for myself." 
Once more, 

" Oh could I now drop the body, I could 
stand and cry to all eternity, without being 
weary, 'Gotl is holy, God is just, God is 
good, God is wise, and faithful, and true V 
How bright, how dazzling, is the pure, unsul- 
lied whiteness of his character, and how 
black, how loathsome, do we appear in con- 
trast with it ! Could I sing upon paper I 
should break forth into singing, for day and 
night I can do nothing but sing." 

And of what a strengthening by the Spirit 
in the inner man, of what a living in Christ, 



88 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

are we told in these words of the eminent 
President Edwards ! — 

"As I read these words (i Tim. i. 17), 
there came into my soul, and was, as it were, 
diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the 
divine Being — a new sense quite different 
from anything I ever experienced before. 
From that time I began to have a new kind 
of apprehension and idea of Christ, and the 
work of redemption, and the glorious way of 
salvation by him. An inward sweet sense 
of these things at times came into my heart, 
and my soul was led away in pleasant views 
and contemplation of them. ,, 

He w r rites of " a calm, delightful abstrac- 
tion of the soul from the concerns of this 
world, and sometimes a kind of vision or 
fixed ideas and imagination of being alone 
in the mountains, or some solitary wilder- 
ness far from all mankind, conversing with 
Christ and wrapt and swallowed up in God. 
The sense I had of divine things would 
often of a sudden kindle up an ardor in my 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 89 

soul that I knew not how to express. After 
this my sense of divine things gradually in- 
creased, and became more and more lively, 
and had more of that inward sweetness. I 
had vehement longings of soul after God and 
Christ and after more holiness, wherewith 
my heart seemed to be full and ready to 
break. I was almost perpetually in the con- 
templation of divine things — almost con- 
stantly in ejaculatory prayer: prayer 
seemed as the breath by which the yearn- 
ings of my heart had vent. The delights 
which I now felt in the things of religion 
were of an exceedingly different kind from 
those before mentioned that I had when a 
a boy, and what I then had no more notion 
of than one born blind has of pleasant and 
beautiful colors. 

"The sweetest joys I have experienced 
have not been those that have arisen from a 
hope of my own good estate, but in a direct 
view of the glorious things of the gospel. " 

Once, in 1737, "I had a view that for me 



90 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

was extraordinary of the glory of the Son 
of God as Mediator between God and man, 
and his wonderful grace, full, pure and 
precious grace and love, and meek and 
gentle condescension. This grace that ap- 
peared so calm and sweet appeared also 
great above the heavens. The person of 
Christ appeared ineffably excellent with an 
excellency great enough to swallow up all 
thought and conception. This view con- 
tinued, as near as I can judge, about an hour, 
and kept me a greater part of the time in a 
flood of tears and weeping aloud." 

These passages, condensed from the biog- 
raphies of these men, exhibit to our view 
some of the manifold forms of experience 
which come when, under the mighty 
strengthening of the Spirit, the eye of faith 
gains a full vision of the Christ within. 
Christ may be in the soul and the soul be 
all unconscious of his presence. He may 
be there and under a dim recognition of the 
soul. But when the Holy Ghost shows him 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 9 1 

there, as able to do for us, but especially in 
us, all that Paul prayed for in that prayer 
for the Ephesian Christians, and not only all 
that Paul had asked for, but all that he had 
11 thought " of for them, and not only all this, 
but " above " all this, and not only above all 
this, but " abundantly " above all this, and 
not only abundantly above, but " exceeding 
abundantly " above all this, — when under the 
illumination of the Holy Spirit we see in 
clear vision our Redeemer able and willing 
to do all this, and this not by any display of 
miraculous power, but " according to the 
power that worketh in us," by simply a more 
energetic exercise of a power actually in 
operation within us, what experiences of the 
majesty, excellency, love and mercy of God 
the soul may enjoy would require an angel's 
pen to write and an angel's tongue to tell. 

God grant it to us all in Jesus' name ! 
Amen ! 




XL 

npHE effects upon the life within and the 
life without of this indwelling, in-living 
of Christ in man will, of course, vary w 7 ith 
the intensity of the illumination, the clear- 
ness of the faith-vision. 

i . One effect of a powerful strengthening 
of the inner man by the Spirit of God, of a 
clear and vivid view, under his influence, of 
those "unsearchable riches of Christ/' will 
appear in a full asstirance of hope, a 
thorough persuasion, free from all misgiv- 
ing, of pardon and acceptance with God, 
and a glad looking forward to a sure home 
in the mansions which Jesus has gone to 
prepare. 

How can the eye, touched by the finger 

92 



CHRIST L1VETH IN ME. 93 

of the Holy Ghost, be fixed full on that 
matchless One and the heart the while fail 
to feel that its salvation is as sure as its 
own existence ? Yonder, in the offing, is a 
wreck yielding timber by timber to the 
pounding of the breakers. From that dis- 
solving wreck tempest, billow and frost 
have already torn many a muscular frame, 
leaving a half dozen men half dead now, 
and soon either to be saved or wholly to 
perish. But, through the storm and over 
the savage billows, toward that wreck a life- 
boat is making its way, and as it nears the 
shivering victims they see in it a young 
girl and an old man — Grace Darling and 
her father. And now, when that boat has 
reached the side of the wreck, is it possible 
that those sailors should doubt that it has 
come for them ? For what else could that 
old man and his child have dared that wrath 
of winds and waters ? 

So when, under the touch of the Holy 
Ghost, I open an unfilmed eye on that 



94 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

Christ within — on Him who, being in the 
form of God, thought it not robbery to be 
equal with God, yet made himself of no 
reputation, took on him the form of a ser- 
vant, was made in the likeness of man, be- 
came obedient unto death, even the death 
of the cross, introduced now by the Holy 
Spirit into my soul, and by his Spirit now 
dwelling there, there clad from head to foot 
with God's best blessing for his obedience 
to all the law, clad, too, in the bloody 
tunic of penal execution, and all this out of 
love to souls like mine, — why should he not 
save me? Why else is he there? While 
this vision of Jesus lasts I can just as easily 
doubt my existence as my salvation ! 

The writer, when a little child, strayed 
away from the door of his home in a great 
city and ere long was lost — lost ! Oh what 
a dreary horror came over his young heart 
when the thought broke over him, "I am 
lost !" At once he began to hurry on, run- 
ning among the crowds, crying, and wander- 



CHRIST LIVE TIT IN ME. 95 

ing farther and farther from home. At 
length, a gentleman, hearing the child's 
cries and seeing his distress, stopped him, 
took him by the hand, inquired his name, 
and then set out to lead him to his home. 
After walking a few squares, as they were 
crossing a street, the child looked up, and, 
lo ! hurrying down the street, they were 
passing his mother, her face full of the 
agony of suspense ! Now, did that child 
doubt that that mpther was looking for 
him ? So far from it that, without one word 
to the man who had so kindly befriended 
him, he broke from his hand and sprang 
away like a young fawn to his mother ! 

But there is a love more tender than that 
of a mother for her child. " Can a woman 
forget her sucking child, that she should 
not have compassion on the son of her 
womb ? Yea, they may forget, yet will not 
I forget thee." Isa. xlix. 15. And now, 
when the soul that has been sought and 
found is enabled to fix the eye fully on that 



96 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

loving Saviour, there is left no room for 
question that salvation is sure. Night- 
shadows cannot stay when the sun is risen. 
But on this soul the Sun of Righteousness 
is risen. While the shutters are closed I 
walk in darkness though it be noonday, but 
fling the shutters open, and now I walk in 
the light. Unbelief is the shutter that ex- 
cludes the light, and faith removes the 
shutter and lets in the light. This strength- 
ening with might of the inner man by the 
Spirit of God removes the shutters so that 
light from the face of Jesus floods the soul, 
darkness flies away, doubt vanishes, and the 
full assurance of hope comes in. Now "I 
know whom I have believed, and am per- 
suaded that he is able to keep that I have 
committed unto him against that day." Now 
I am persuaded that " neither death, nor 
life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor 
powers, nor things present, nor things to 
come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other 
creature, shall be able to separate me from 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 97 

the love of God which is in Jesus Christ my 
Lord." 

2. Another effect of such a living of 
Christ in the believer will appear in a full- 
hearted love. 

It is through faith that we gain this assur- 
ing vision of Christ, and faith " worketh by 
love, displays its activity through love." 
This love is first a love of admiration and 
then a love of gratitude. It is an admiring 
love of Christ for what he is and a grateful 
love of Christ for what he has done. 

Recognition of moral excellence by one 
who is himself advanced to a certain degree 
in that excellence cannot fail to work in the 
observer a loving admiration, somewhat pro- 
portioned to the quality recognized. That 
neighbor of spotless integrity, of chaste and 
delicate modesty, of tender affection, tireless 
in toil and self-sacrifice for others' good, that 
one that delights in nothing else so much as 
in seeing and making others happy, — how 
can you know and not love that one ! And 



98 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

this admiring affection will increase in intens- 
ity just in proportion as these characteris- 
tics come more fully out to view. But as 
the full-orbed moon seems dark with defile- 
ment and the stars stained with filth in con- 
trast with Him who made them (Job xxv. 
4-8), so of all human excellence in the pres- 
ence of our Christ ! 

" Oh could I speak the matchless worth, 
Oh could I sound the glories forth, 

Which in my Saviour shine, 
I'd soar and touch the heavenly strings, 
And vie with Gabriel while he sings 
In notes almost divine. 

« I'd sing the characters he bears, 
And all the forms of love he wears, 

Exalted on his throne ; 
In loftiest songs of sweetest praise 
I would to everlasting days 

Make all his glories known." 

Such gentleness, such divine forbearance, 
such uncomplaining endurance while hunted 
like a partridge upon the mountains, while 
spit upon, smitten with the fist, smitten with 
the palm of the hand, answering back to the 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 99 

pitiless insults upon the cross with his all- 
pardoning prayer, "Father, forgive them; for 
they know not what they do," — all this and 
all the rest now revealed to me, not on the 
printed page, but in the verifying light of 
direct faith-vision ; all this, and much more 
than all this, showed me as not merely his- 
torical, but actual, not what was, but what is 
now and for evermore ! And when I thus 
see him I cannot choose but exclaim, 
" Beautiful as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, 
chiefest among ten thousand, altogether 
lovely !" 

New fuet^on this flame of love is cast by 
every act of beneficence in his ceaselessly 
beneficent life. See him there, the God- 
man, with those little babes in his arms; 
there overcome by the importunities of the 
Syrophenician woman ; there bending over 
the corpse of the little girl in Capernaum, 
the father and mother looking on and listen- 
ing as he said, " Talitha cumi !" there in the 
great crowd feeling the healing virtue go 



100 CHRIST LIVBTH IN ME. 

out through the hem of his garment, and 
then speaking so tenderly to the affrighted 
woman that trembled at her own cure ! 
there gone all the way from Capernaum to 
Nain to meet the woman who, having 
buried her husband, was now on the way to 
bury the son on whose arm she had hoped 
to lean as the staff of her declinimg years, 
and through eyes red with weeping looked 
out upon a world cold and desolate, to stop 
that bier, give back that boy from the dead, 
and send home to a thanksgiving festival 
her who had come forth to break her heart 
over that new-made tomb ! And now, when 
we see him in the new light thrown on him 
by this mighty strengthening of the Spirit, 
with all these elements of beauty and all 
these virtues in actual exercise, what shall 
hinder that all, all our heart shall not go out 
upon him ? 

But our love will be also one of respon- 
sive gratitude. A pauper child in an Eng- 
lish almshouse is suddenly conveyed away 



CHRIST LIVE 771 IN ME. 101 

to a house of education, is clothed, fed, in- 
structed, and then, grown up to mature 
years, is appointed to this post of honor and 
emolument, and then advanced to that, and 
one day the discovery bursts upon him that 
the queen of the realm had seen him in his 
poverty and misery, and, lo ! there she is 
now, gazing on him with a look of benefi- 
cent affection ! Oh what shall, what can he 
do, to express the grateful love that fills his 
heart to breaking ? 

But was not I that pauper child ? What 
poverty and wretchedness like mine ? With- 
out God, without hope in the world, wretched, 
and miserable, and poor, and blind, and 
naked, no eye to pity, no arm to save, 
when 

" With pitying eye the Prince of grace 
Beheld my helpless grief, 
He saw, and oh, amazing love, 
He ran to my relief ! 

" Down from the shining seats above 
With joyful haste he fled, 



102 CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 

Entered the grave with mortal flesh, 
And dwelt among the dead ! 

" Oh, for such love let rocks and hills 
Their lasting silence break, 
And all harmonious human tongues 
The Saviour's praises speak." 

But this is not all. I can love a man who 
has brought home my neighbors child, 
saved by him from a sudden and violent 
death, but what if that man come into my 
door bearing in his arms the half-insensible 
body of my boy dripping with the water 
that but for this man's exposure of his own 
life had been that child's death ? Some who 
read these pages can say, " This Jesus has 
saved my wife, or my husband, my son, my 
daughter, my whole family — saved us all, 
and provided for us one of those golden 
mansions in the skies ! And now, as we 
sit around our family fireside, w r e think of 
that mansion above, and sing, 

< No parting yonder ; 
In that world above, 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. IO3 

Nothing shall sunder 

Hearts bound in love ; 
Dearer and fonder, 

Together we'll rove ! 

« None wanting yonder ; 

Bought by the Lamb, 
All gathered under 

The evergreen palm, 
While loud as night's thunder 

Ascends the glad psalm !' " 

Yes, some who read these lines will re- 
call scenes of sorrow made bright by the 
presence of this precious Friend. " Oh/' 
said a Christian father after the funeral of 
a daughter gone in the triumphs of faith — 
" Oh, I am overwhelmed at the thought of 
the honor put upon my home in the glories 
of such a death !" 

And now, in this light of the Holy Ghost, 
I am enabled to gaze with full, clear eye on 
this Christ, lovely with all the loveliness of 
heaven, " clad in that rich attire " of benefi- 
cent deeds, my Saviour and the Saviour 
of those I most dearly love, and who can 
measure the love that now goes out to him ? 



104 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

3. The sister and well-nigh constant com- 
panion of this assurance and this love is an 
abounding joy. 

This love is a fruit of the Spirit, and one 
of the apples on this tree is joy. "The fruit 
of the Spirit is love, joy, peace," and the 
rest. To be assured of one's salvation is to 
possess a fountain of joy, and to love is joy 
itself. " Whom having not seen " with the 
bodily eye "ye love, in whom, though now 
ye see him not, yet believing ,, — that is, see- 
ing him with the eye of faith as shown in 
the light of the Holy Ghost — "ye rejoice 
with joy unspeakable and full of glory !" 
i Pet. i. 8. 

This accords with the command, " Rejoice 
in the Lord." Phil. iii. 1. "Rejoice in the 
Lord alway, and again I say, Rejoice." Phil, 
iv. 4. It reminds of the axiom, " The joy of 
the Lord is your strength." Neh. viii. 10. 
Not that no sorrow can ever come near one 
in whom Christ thus lives. Many are the 
afflictions of the righteous. A man came 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 105 

home to his family with a countenance that 
indicated an aching heart. His wife, with the 
instinct of love, at once detected the sign, 
and asked an explanation. " My dear," he 
replied, " all is lost ! I am a broken, poverty- 
stricken bankrupt !" and his face was pale 
and his voice trembled while he spoke. 
What was his surprise to hear her say, 
" You are mistaken ; all is not lost !" 

" Pray tell me what is saved." 

" Why, you have me yet and these dear 
children ; God has not taken us away." 

Ah, yes, in such a wife and home there 
was an abiding fountain of joy. And this 
believer in whom Christ is living has a hid- 
ing-place from every wind, a cover from 
every storm, rivers of water in a dry place, 
the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, 
an ever-bubbling fountain of joy whatever 
sorrows may befall ! 

4. Another concomitant is a special de- 
light in prayer and communion with God. 

Between man in his littleness and the 



106 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

high and lofty One whose name is holy 
there seems a gulf for which there is no 
bridge. But the blessed " Daysman " comes 
between and lays a hand on each, and thus 
in himself Creator and creature are brought 
together. Between them there is commu- 
nion, interchange, as it were, of thoughts and 
mutual expressions of love whenever man 
lifts his mind in faith to God. 

But how often do we go to our closets of 
devotion as a child into the presence of a 
father just returned after a long absence, 
and how often as one goes to an irksome 
task ! Reader, why did you go into the 
closet to-day ? Was it because of the de- 
lights anticipated there, or was it because of 
the thorns that conscience would have thrust 
into your soul had you neglected that duty ? 

With Christ living in me, my soul full of 
his quickening power, how sweet to pray ! 
How precious each season of communion 
with my God ! Years ago my earthly father 
died — died, as he had lived, in the faith of 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. \OJ 

Jesus — and from him since that time we have 
heard no tidings, have received no message. 
Suppose, now, that God should grant our 
mother the privilege of holding interviews 
with that father, of bringing us messages 
from him and bearing him messages from 
us ? Would there be reluctance on our part 
to avail ourselves of the privilege of com- 
munication with our sainted father through 
such a medium ? Would it require the lash 
of conscience to scourge us to our duty ? 

But " I have a Father in the promised 
land," the God and Father of our Lord and 
Saviour Jesus Christ. And I have an Elder 
Brother, faithful with all fidelity, lovely with 
all loveliness, and through that Brother I 
may have interviews with my heavenly 
Father. And now, when under the light of 
the Holy Ghost in its mighty shining in my 
soul upon my Saviour, showing him to me 
in all his glory as my Mediator, how gladly 
do I pour my thoughts through him into my 
Father's ear, and how sure am I that my 



108 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

petitions perfumed by Jesus' breath are like 
fragrance before the throne of God ! 

That Son of God loves that Father with 
all the heart, soul, mind and strength. That 
Father has more than once dropped from 
the blue skies his recognizing word, " This 
is my beloved Son in whom I am well 
pleased." That Son so loves me that he 
gave himself for me. Now, speaking his 
sweet name in my Father's ears, I am sure 
that God is pleased, and my soul therein is 
full of joy ! 

" Sweet hour of prayer ! sweet hour of prayer ! 
That calls me from a world of care, 
And bids me at my Father's throne 
Make all my wants and wishes known ; 
In seasons of distress and grief 
My soul has often found relief, 
And oft escaped the tempter's snare 
By thy return, sweet hour of prayer." 

Now, I can be careful for nothing, but in 
everything by prayer and supplications, with 
thanksgiving, can let my requests be made 
known unto God, and thus the peace of God 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. IO9 

which passeth all understanding keep my 
heart and mind through Christ Jesus. Phil, 
iv. 6, 7. 

" From every stormy wind that blows, 
From every swelling tide of woes, 
There is a calm, a sure retreat, 
'Tis found beneath the mercy-seat. 

" There is a place where Jesus sheds 
The oil of gladness on our heads — 
A place than all besides more sweet, 
It is the blood-bought mercy-seat. 

« There, there on eagles' wings we soar, 
And sin and sense seem all no more, 
And heaven comes down our souls to greet, 
And glory crowns the mercy-seat." 

5. Nor is it difficult to see that another 
of the results of this indwelling, a concom- 
itant of this assurance of hope, abounding 
love, joy in the Holy Ghost, rich communion 
with God, will be a Christ-like meekness, a 
profound humility. 

Room for pride, and self-conceit, and 
haughty looking down upon others, and 
censoriousness of spirit, there cannot be. 



IIO CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

No element in the consciousness of the be- 
liever is more profound than that of his in- 
debtedness to pure sovereign grace for 
every precious thing in his possession and 
experience wherein he differs from others. 
Can that family be proud of that table 
every crumb of bread on which has come 
from the hand of charity? Can that par- 
doned man be proud of the deliverance 
wrought out for him by the self-sacrificing 
love of those for injuries to whom he had 
been thrust into prison ? I was a convict 
condemned to death, and I now enjoy the 
green fields, the blue skies and the free air 
of heaven in exchange for the narrow, loath- 
some cell only because He whom I injured 
by my sins took my place on the gallows. 
I was at enmity with God, and sovereign 
grace changed my heart and enabled me to 
love. And now only my Christ, wounded, 
slain, risen in me, seen by me through a free 
sovereign strengthening of the Holy Ghost, 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 1 1 1 

can keep me from sinking lower even than I 
was by nature. 

Pride, self-esteem, self-sufficiency, accom- 
panied by critical, ill-natured scanning of 
others' attainments and overbearing censor- 
ship of others' faults, to puffed hypocrisy are 
natural, to Christian godliness impossible. 

6. Another necessary effect of Christ 
thus living in the soul is a zealous activity 
in his cause. 

Two classes, traveling in opposite direc- 
tions, miss the narrow, true and middle 
way. A member of the Church once said 
to me, " If-J had a home in some wilderness, 
away from contact with the world, I think I 
could be a good Christian/' And there are 
timid,, shrinking spirits that in such spots 
would dream away their lives in pious fan- 
cies and holy ecstacies. Leaving the battle 
and toil of life to others, they w r ould float to 
heaven on a rose-covered barge. Others, 
on the contrary, are so engrossed with the 
activities of religious life, are members and 



112 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

officers in so many societies, that the path 
to the closet becomes grass-grown and the 
Bible-clasps become rusted from disuse. 

Now, neither of these forms of Christian 
piety agrees with the law and the testimony, 
either with its theory or its examples. Into 
those cloisters whither these have fled from 
the sterner duties of life come God's voices 
of woe : " Woe unto them that lie on beds 
of ivory, and stretch themselves upon their 
couches, and are not grieved for the afflic- 
tions of Joseph ! Curse ye Meroz, curse 
ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof, because 
they come not up to the help of the Lord 
against the mighty !" And they whose 
ever-engrossing labors allow them no time 
for reading and quiet pondering of God's 
word, and little time for prayer, will one day 
sigh, "They made me keeper of the vine- 
yards, but mine own vineyard have I not 
kept !" 

The true theory of piety on this point is 
found in Christ living zvithiit. If Christ 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. II3 

live in and through our organs and facul- 
ties, he must be himself. And what is he 
but one who goes "about doing good?" 
What but one self-devoured by zeal for the 
Lord's house ? 

Christ liveth in us by his Spirit, and the 
one thought of his Spirit is Christ's glorifi- 
cation : " He shall glorify me, for he shall 
receive of mine, and shall show it unto you." 
John xvi. 14. Christ's humiliation consisted 
largely in his being trampled under foot of 
men. His glorification consists largely in 
his being exalted among men. Hence, his 
Spirit in a believer fills that believer with an 
ardent desire for the salvation of souls, and 
moves him to whatever his hand finds to 
do that souls may be saved, and thus this 
downtrodden Christ lifted on high among 
men, that thus the travailing Saviour may 
be rewarded by his seeing of the travail of 
his soul ! 

In fact, what do Scripture examples 
show? At that early day when the Spirit 



114 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

of Jesus had free course in converted souls, 
what scenes of love and activity gladdened 
the Saviour and amazed the world ! 

"And when they had prayed, the place 
was shaken where they were assembled 
together ; and they were all filled with the 
Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of 
God with boldness. And the multitude of 
them that believed were of one heart and 
of one soul : neither said any of them that 
aught of the things which he possessed was 
his own, but they had all things common. 
And with great power gave the apostles 
witness of the resurrection of the Lord 
Jesus ; and great grace was upon them all. 
Neither was there any among them that 
lacked ; for as many as were possessors of 
lands or houses sold them, and brought the 
prices of the things that were sold, and 
laid them down at the apostles' feet: and 
distribution was made unto every man ac- 
cording as he had need. ,, 

What example is more in point than that 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 1 1 5 

of the man who wrote the words, " Christ 
liveth in me" ? What was the effect on his 
life of this living of Christ within him ? 

"From Jerusalem, and round about unto 
Illyricum, I have fully preached the gospel 
of Christ. Yea, so have I strived to preach 
the gospel, not where Christ was named, 
lest I should build upon another man's 
foundation, but now having no more place 
in these parts, and having a great de- 
sire these many years to come unto you ; 
whensoever I take my journey into Spain, 
I will come to you : for I trust to see you in 
my journey, and to be brought on my way 
thitherward by you, if first I be somewhat 
filled with your company. Therefore watch, 
and remember that by the space of three 
years I ceased not to warn every one night 
and day with tears." 

7. One more result of this in- living of 
Christ is deliverance from the power of sin. 

Dr. Chalmers, in his excellent lectures on 
Romans, in various places writes with all 



Il6 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

his eloquence upon this point, the power of 
the presence of Christ by faith to hold the 
depravities in abeyance and set the powers 
of the inner man in holy exercise : 

" Let us believe that we shall live with 
him here> by entering even now upon the fel- 
lowship of those virtues which adorn his 
character, and of that spirit which actuated 
the whole of his conduct, and according to 
this belief, if it be real, so shall it be done 
unto us. 

" The best practical receipt I can give for 
becoming holy is to be steadfast in the faith. 
Believe that Christ's righteousness is your 
righteousness, and his graces will become 
your graces. 

"In a word, faith is the instrument of 
sanctification, and when you have learned 
the use of this instrument you have learned 
the way to become holy upon earth now as 
well as the way to become eternally happy 
in heaven. 

" Sin is that scandal which must be rooted 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. \\*J 

out from that great spiritual household over 
which the Divinity rejoices. . . . Strange 
administration, indeed, for sin to be so hate- 
ful to God as to lay all who had incurred it 
under death, and yet, when readmitted into 
life, that sin should be permitted, and that 
what was before the object of destroying 
vengeance should now become the object 
of an upheld and protected toleration ! . . . 
Now that the doom is taken off, think you it 
is possible that the unchangeable God has 
so given up his antipathy to sin as that 
man, ruined and redeemed man, may now 
perseveringly indulge, under the new ar- 
rangement, in that which under the old de- 
stroyed him ? Does not the God who loved 
righteousness and hated iniquity six thou- 
sand years ago bear the same love to right- 
eousness and hatred to iniquity still ? . . . I 
now breathe the air of loving-kindness from 
heaven and can walk before God in peace 
and graciousness ; shall I again attempt the 
incompatible alliance of tw r o principles so 



Il8 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

adverse as that of an approving God and a 
persevering sinner ? How shall we, recov- 
ered from so awful a catastrophe, continue 
that which first involved us in it? . . . The 
cross of Christ, by the same mighty and de- 
cisive stroke wherewith it moved the curse 
of sin away from us, also moves away the 
power and the love from over us. . . . What 
you have distinctly to do, my brethren, in 
the heat and urgency of your besetting 
temptations, is to set up your death unto 
sin in Christ as your defence against the 
farther authority of sin over you." 

When I am walking with a friend whom I 
dearly love and intensely desire to gratify, I 
carefully avoid whatever may be offensive 
and painful to him. But under this illumi- 
nation of the Spirit I am consciously walk- 
ing with Christ. I see him in his beauty, 
and hence sin — so offensive to him, that drew 
all his tears and spiked his hands and feet 
fast to the fatal wood — how dare I yield to it, 
how can I tolerate the thought of it ? 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 1 1 9 

A lady expected a dear friend to spend a 
few days with her. That friend a few 
months before had lost an only son in a 
shipwreck. In the room where they would 
spend most of the time there hung a pic- 
ture of a fearful wreck, w r ith drowning men 
clinging to cordage, with parting plank and 
drifting spar. With the instinctive delicacy 
of a woman's heart the hostess said to her- 
self, "That picture must come down, else 
it will constantly remind my dear friend of 
her perished boy." But now my Saviour by 
his Spirit is on a visit to my soul, or rather 
I now see and feel him here, and how 
can I keep my sins in action in his dear 
presence ? 

Christ and sin can have no fellowship, 
and Christ living in us is the one great 
antidote of sin. 



XII. 



HPHE DEGREE OF SANCTIFICATION to which 

we may be lifted by the in-living 
Christ is a question the time spent in the 
discussion of which were perhaps more 
profitably given to efforts after a higher de- 
gree of it in our own experience. 

Still, whatever theoretic difficulties may 
invest the subject, we are safe in saying 
that no little boldness of spirit is required, 
whether to affirm that anything like sinless 
perfection — release from connate, persistent 
depravities — is to be expected this side the 
death-hour, or to set any definite limit to 
the soul's possible, practicable advance in 
the divine life. 

"Who can say, I have made my heart 
clean, I am pure from my sin ?" Prov. xx. 



120 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 121 

9. In many things we all offend. James 
iii. 2. "If we walk in the light, as he is in 
the light, we have fellowship one with an- 
other, and the blood of Jesus Christ cleans- 
eth us from all sin." If we say that " even 
in this state n we have no sin, — " no depravi- 
ties whose action needs constant neutrali- 
zation by the presence and power of a cru- 
cified, living, sanctifying Christ," — we deceive 
ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 

Herein, indeed, is a great mystery — a new 
nature and an old nature — a new man and 
the old man — these dwelling side by side in 
the recesses of the same personality — surely 
this is a mystery ! The man has become in 
such a sense a new creature that he claims 
the use of the personal pronoun and says, 
" It is no more ' I ' that do it, but sin that 
dwelleth in me." Yet that sin, that old man, 
is there, and in countless instances compels 
the believer to cry out, " Oh wretched man 
that I am, who shall deliver me from the 
body of this death ?" 



122 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

While then in this world, a world that is 
smitten and penetrated with the sin-poison, 
atmosphere and soil, waters and rocks, sin 
stalking or lurking everywhere, there is no 
prospect of release from the damage done 
our nature in the fall ; and the problem of 
the Christian life is not to rid ourselves of, 
but to subdue and keep in subjection, the 
depravities of the heart, through the steady 
application by faith of the in-living Christ. 

We have seen an account of a spring in 
California called the "death spring." Its 
waters are clear, sparkling and cold, but in- 
stead of refreshing they kill: For, flowing 
through a foundation impregnated with 
arsenic, they hold arsenic in solution. Let 
us suppose that the earth for some distance 
down were dug away, and in its stead there 
were placed a mass of matter through which 
the waters must henceforth flow, which 
matter has the power to abstract all poison- 
ous qualities from the water and emit it at 
the surface pure and salubrious. Now, 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 1 23 

those waters are in themselves just what 
they were before. The fountain is the 
same, and yet in passing through this new 
medium they lose all their poison. 

Were this transforming mass at any time 
removed, the waters would be as poisonous 
as ever. If any portion of the deadly 
spring find its way to the surface without 
passing through this healing medium, the 
waters in so far will be poisoned. 

May not this illustrate the condition of 
the child of God ? If there be in the wide 
world a death spring it is the human heart 
— " deceitful above all things, desperately 
wicked." The new birth, regeneration, the 
new creation in Christ Jesus, works a great 
change, but no such change as expels or 
obliterates the old depravities. That 
change, however, makes the soul partici- 
pant in the life of Christ — makes it a resi- 
dence of Christ. And now, by the operation 
of faith, Christ becomes the life of the soul ; 
by a higher operation, more still the life 



124 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

of the soul; and by a strengthening with 
might by God's Spirit of the inner man, 
Christ may so live in the soul, fill the soul, 
as, like the medicament in the spring, to 
heal to a large extent the life-issues of the 
soul. Just so far forth as one is enabled by 
faith to hold Christ, as it were, between the 
new self and the old self, the old self will be 
kept in abeyance, the new self will be filled 
with Christ and the believer will be dead to 
sin and alive to God ! The old depravity is 
yet there — there not only in Saul while he 
is breathing out threatenings and slaughter, 
but in Paul while he is exclaiming, " I know 
whom I have believed/' But in the former 
case there is no interposed Christ; in the 
latter, Christ is there living in the souPs 
life. If faith flag, then the bitter waters 
flow again ; if it become almost dead, then 
back may come in horrid flow all the filth 
whose ingredients are catalogued in the 

o o 

Epistle to the Galatians (Gal. v. 19-21) as 
the " works of the flesh." A David will 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 1 25 

perpetrate those horrid crimes, and a Peter 
will curse and swear and deny his master ! 

Thus everything, to the end of the life on 
earth, depends on Christ as he is in the be- 
liever by his Spirit and as he lives in him 
through the operation of faith. If Christ let 
him go, if he let Christ go, it is as when an 
infant drops from the nurse's arms over the 
edge of a precipice ! 

Change of heart, then, which makes the 
in-being of Christ at once a possibility and 
a necessity, by no means in this life puts the 
subject of the change in sinlessness by the 
side of the angels, who have naught to do 
but sing and soar for evermore. 




XIII. 



/~^N the other hand, who will venture 
to set definite limits to attainments in 
holiness possible and practicable on the part 
of those in whom Christ is living ? 

That a style of Christian life and expe- 
rience greatly higher than anything we often 
see, very greatly higher than that of the ma- 
jority of church-members, is desirable and 
possible, is intimated by the too well- 
grounded sneers of the world, and it is more 
than intimated by the discrepancy between 
our doctrines and our lives ; it is asserted in 
the self-disgust of thousands of God's peo- 
ple with their present attainments, and by 
their hungerings and thirstings after higher 
attainments, and is certified by the lives of 
some of the saints of God. 

126 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. \2J 

Is the world unreasonable ? The less 
excuse, then, for us if we so live as to make 
the criticisms of unreasonableness itself 
reasonable ! What a creed is ours ! Man 
immortal — on his way to the judgment — his 
sins as many as his moments — every sin 
deserving God's wrath and curse in this life 
and the life to come — a heaven above us so 
pure and bright that if we should see it as 
it is we should pray that we might die — a 
hell beneath so fearful that should we see it 
as it is and be compelled to fear our en- 
trance there we should wish we had never 
been born — and then that Son of God, in 
the manger, in that faithful life, in that aw- 
ful death, and then gone up to heaven ! 
These doctrines, in the mind, and borne 
thence by the quickening Spirit of God into 
the soul, are enough to create a life "under 
the ribs of death !" They made the dying 
thief think his cross a crown — Paul and 
Silas their prison a palace, their chains 
wreaths of roses and their bleeding 



128 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME, 

wounds kisses of love ; they made that 
band of Galilean peasants the wonder of 
the world ! Thus the very framework of 
our holy religion shows us heights beckon- 
ing us far beyond aught we have known in 
actual experience. 

A longing for something greatly higher 
than the actual is one of the instincts of 
true piety. "As the hart panteth after the 
waterbrooks, so panteth my soul after thee, 
O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the 
living God ; when shall I come and appear 
before God ?" Where in literature will you 
find aught more tender and fervid than 
Paul's exhortations and entreaties? As 
when he writes to the Christians of Rome 
(chap, xii.) : 

* "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by 
the mercies of God, that ye present your 
bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable, 
unto God, which is your reasonable service. 
And be not conformed to this world: but 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 1 29 

be ye transformed by the renewing of your 
mind, that ye may prove what is that good, 
and acceptable, and perfect, will of God." 
And to those of Ephesus : 

14 Stand, therefore, having your loins girt 
about with truth, and having on the breast- 
plate of righteousness, and your feet 
shod with the preparation of the gospel of 
peace ; above all, taking the shield of 
faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench 
all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take 
the helmet of salvation, and the sword of 
the Spirit, which is the word of God : pray- 
ing always with all prayer and supplication 
in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with 
all perseverance and supplication for all 
saints." Ephesians vi. 14-18. 

How touching such words as these from 
the heart of that wonderful man, the Rev. 
Joseph Addison Alexander ! — " Oh for light ! 
God is light. Oh for more love ! God is 
love ; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth 
in God and God in him. Oh let me dwell 



I30 CHRIST LIVETH IN MA. 

in thee eternally !" And how constant the 
sigh and the song ! — 

« Look how we grovel here below, 
Fond of these trifling toys ! 
Our souls can neither fly nor go 
To reach eternal joys. 

" In vain we tune our formal songs, 
In vain we strive to rise ; 
Hosannas languish on our tongues, 
And our devotion dies. 

" Dear Lord, and shall we ever live 
At this poor dying rate, 
Our love so faint, so cold to thee, 
And thine to us so great ?" 

But on this subject nothing is more in- 
structive and inspiring than the yearnings 
and prayers of Saint Paul with which his 
strains of writing so often culminate. Thus 
in the first Epistle to the Thessalonians (v. 
23) we read, "I pray God your whole spirit 
and soul and body be presented blameless 
unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will 
do it" This follows the exhortations, "Re- 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 131 

joice evermore — pray without ceasing — ab- 
stain from all appearance of evil/' 

Startled by the contrast between the 
measure of piety set before us in such pas- 
sages and our actual experience, we are 
apt to say to ourselves, " But Paul is here 
thinking of the perfection of holy life in 
heaven. " Thus our self-defensive exegesis 
often, like gilded points, disarms a text of 
its force and reduces it from the condition 
of a cloud all alive with electric energy, 
" with heaven's artillery fraught," to the con- 
dition of one of those beautiful, tame things 
that float in the summer sky. And when we 
read, " Sanctify you wholly" — spirit, soul and 
body preserved blameless — we say, "Ah, 
yes ! the apostle is thinking of a better world 
than this !" And yet it is evident that the 
apostle's mind was on life in this world 
alone ! The body is mentioned as subject 
to sanctification, and of course this is neither 
the body in the grave nor the resurrection 
body. Then the prayer is for a preserva- 



132 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

tion in blamelessness unto the coming of 
Christy which can mean nothing else than a 
preservation of them during their life on 
earth. The sanctification which is here de- 
picted as that at which all believers ought 
to aim, as a prize after which all ought to be 
reaching, presents a degree very much 
higher than many of us have yet attained. 

Turn again to that exhaustless passage 
in the third chapter of Ephesians and hold 
it well before the mind ; subject it to devout, 
prayerful meditation, and it will open before 
you a prospect that will make you sigh for 
eagle wings to bear you up to those sunlit 
terraces of Christian experience. At the 
close of the twentieth verse the apostle 
speaks of a power that is now working in 
us, in all true believers. This is the power 
that regenerated us, created us anew in 
Christ Jesus. " The infinite power of God, 
from which so much may be expected, is the 
same of which we are now the subjects. It 
is that power which wrought in Christ when 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 1 33 

it raised him from the dead. No definite 
bounds, therefore, can be set to what they 
may expect in whom Christ dwells and who 
are the objects of his infinite love."* 

By a simple operation of this power now 
at zvork in us, by a special and mighty yet 
strictly normal and unmiraculous forth-put- 
ting of that power, Paul enthusiastically 
says, " God is able to do in us all that we — 
1 I, the apostle' — ask or think !" But he asks 
and thinks great things for us, even that — 
in some degree commensurate with the 
ches of God's glory (v. 16) — we may be 
nightily strengthened in our inner nature— 
our renewed nature — to the indwelling of 
Christ by faith — faith seeing him there in 
all his Messianic fullness of power and 
grace — till we, rooted and grounded in love 
— love flowing through and pervading us — 
grasp in our comprehension, to some good 
degree, the matchless love of Christ to us, 
and thus be filled as full as our finite 

* Dr. Charles Hocl^e. 



134 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

natures whilst yet on earth can hold of the 
moral qualities of our God, and thus become 
" partakers of the divine nature." 

These are the things that Paul has 
thought and asked; and then, as with a 
sigh over the infirmities of human language, 
he gives it up, and gives us over unto Him 
who is able to do in us what he has asked 
and thought, able to do above all he has 
asked and thought, yea, abundantly above, 
yea, exceeding abundantly above, all that 
he has asked or thought, and all this by the 
single operation of the power now at work 
in us ! 

As we look around us in this chamber of 
celestial imagery, and contrast what we see 
with what we are, shall we sigh, "Alas!" 
and give up in despair? Nay, rather let us 
shout, Hallelujah! and yield ourselves to 
the operation of that mighty power that 
worketh in us ! 

If by faith I am enabled to see my Sa- 
viour in me clad with all his pow r er, who 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 1 35 

can tell to what height he may lift me away 
from the reach and operation of my deprav- 
ities, and to what extent he is able to en- 
gross all my powers with his life ? We 
nothing — he everything ! 

To Paul's prayer add Paul's experience. 
That this experience was very profound and 
far-reaching, and at times almost seraphic, 
none can doubt who accept his utterances 
as those of a truthful, honest man. As 
great values are shut up in small diamonds, 
so a world of sweet thought is housed in 
that one brief word, " For to me to live is 
Christ, and to die is gain." Phil. i. 21. 
Death and life hang before him in singular 
counterpoise. He looks at the one, he 
looks at the other. How few would hesi- 
tate between them ! Yet he hesitates ! He 
hardly dare allow a preference ! Of one 
thing he is very sure, and that is that in 
either case " Christ will be magnified " 
(ver. 20) ; for, says he, " In my case living 
consists in such union with Christ as that 



136 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME, 

my whole being is his. In me life and 
Christ are one. All my time, my actions, 
my energies, are his — I live Christ." In 
another Epistle, he says, " Christ liveth in 
me." He lives himself over again in me. 
Here he says, " I live Christ over again in 
myself." This is surely a lofty height of 
piety, and it is farther illustrated in such 
outgoings of his soul as these : 

"And not only so, but we glory in tribu- 
lations also : knowing that tribulation work- 
eth patience ; and patience, experience ; and 
experience, hope : and hope maketh not 
ashamed ; because the love of God is shed 
abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost 
which is given unto us." Rom. v. 3-5. 

In his intense love for souls : " For I could 
wish that myself were accursed from Christ 
for my brethren, my kinsmen according to 
the flesh." Rom. ix. 3. 

In his ardent love for the brethren : 
"Therefore, my brethren dearly beloved 
and longed for, my joy and crown, so stand 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 1 37 

fast in the Lord, my dearly beloved." Phil, 
iv. 1. 

" For what is our hope, or joy, or crown 
of rejoicing ? Are not even ye in the pres- 
ence of our Lord Jesus Christ at his com- 
ing? For ye are our glory and joy." i 
Thess. ii. 19. 

In his passionate love of Christ : " But God 
forbid that I should glory, save in the cross 
of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the 
world is crucified unto me, and I unto the 
world." Gal. vi. 14. 

"Yea, doubtless, and I count all things 
but loss for the excellency of the knowledge 
of Christ Jesus my Lord : for whom I have 
suffered the loss of all things, and do count 
them but dung, that I may win Christ." 
Phil. iii. 8. 

" Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, 
in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, 
in distresses for Christ's sake." 2 Cor. xii. 
10. 

But what need of citations on a point like 



I3§ CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

this ? What now shall we say when we see 
imbuing the whole life of this man an in- 
tense desire for something higher still than 
anything in his experience thus far? Hear 
him as he tells the Philippians : 

"Not as though I had already attained, 
either were already perfect: but I follow 
after, if that I may apprehend that for which 
also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus. 
Brethren, I count not myself to have appre- 
hended : but this one thing / do, forgetting 
those things which are behind, and reaching 
forth unto those things which are before, I 
press toward the mark for the prize of the 
high calling of God in Christ Jesus. " 

One life-long struggle more and more 
and more to apprehend, to possess himself 
of, that for which Christ had laid hold upon 
him ! Christ had gone after him to Damas- 
cus and had apprehended him there — had 
taken hold of him and taken him to himself 
—for what? To realize in him that for 
which he had been chosen — " According as 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 1 39 

he hath chosen us in him that we should be 
holy and without blame before him in love." 
Eph. i. 4. " And you hath he reconciled in 
the body of his flesh through death to pre- 
sent you holy and unblamable and unre- 
provable in his right. ,, Col. i. 22. This 
was a part, and an exceedingly important 
part of that for which Christ had appre- 
hended him, and a part, and an exceedingly 
important part, of that which he struggled 
to apprehend in his experience. In this 
spiritual struggle — " Excelsior !" his con- 
stant motto — he fully recognized the force 
of his own words, that God was able to do 
in him exceeding abundantly above all that 
he asked or thought ! 

Let us not, then, insult our Saviour by 
setting any limits to our possible and prac- 
ticable advance in the divine life under his 
influence ! 



XIV. 



/^^LOSELY connected with this question 
of the possible degree of elevation in 
the divine life is that of the permanence of 
any special experience of the power of 
Christ in and over the heart. 

Were we questioning as to the actual ex- 
perience of God's people, thousands of 
voices would testify that the general rule is 
that of change, vicissitude, periodicity. The 
actual path of all, or certainly almost all, be- 
lievers is flecked with light and shade, the 
course lying over Pisgah heights, through 
dark gorges, over deep, angry torrents, 
through smiling meadows, "everything by 
turns and nothing long." If the experience 
is more equable, it is in some cases with the 
equability of an almost unbroken worldli- 



140 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 141 

nesh of spirit, in other cases with that of a 
dull, monotonous level of semi-vitality, very 
rarely with that of Tabor illumination. 
Bunyan went little astray in averaging re- 
ligious experience as a succession of Hills 
of Difficulty, Palaces of Beauty, Valleys of 
Humiliation, Valleys of the Shadow of Death, 
walks along the River of God, days in 
Doubting Castle, others on the Delectable 
Mountains, losing the scroll and finding it 
again, entanglement in the net of the Flat- 
terer, rescue and scourging. 

The promise is, " They that wait on the 
Lord shall renew their strength ; they shall 
mount up with wings as eagles ; they shall run 
and not be weary; they shall walk and not 
faint." But here is a pit, and in it a man. 
His friends, having seized one arm, are put- 
ting to all their strength to lift him out. At 
the bottom of the pit is a chest of gold, and 
with one hand the man is clutching the 
handle of that chest. His friends pull, and 
the man persists in trying to bring up the 



142 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

chest with him. That man represents a 
certain style of Christian life. The chest is 
the world. The friends are his conscience 
and all influences* that seek to lift him to a 
better life. The man, instead of mounting 
up on wings as eagles, is dragged with 
hard pulling and tortured wrenches up to 
heaven ! 

Here, again, is a bright quartz pebble. 
Through much attrition its edges have been 
worn down and it has been wrought into 
symmetry, and there it lies by the roadside. 
As the carriages of the world's gayety and 
the carts of its toil go by, the dust rises and 
falls on that white pebble until it can hardly 
be distinguished from the surrounding 
earth. At length, however, a generous 
shower descends, and, lo ! the pebble is 
white and beautiful as ever, and says to 
itself, " Now I will retain this whiteness and 
part with it no more !" But the foolish 
thing still lies upqn the roadside, and never 
even desires a change of place nor thinks 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 1 43 

to ask some passer-by to remove it to a 
spot beyond the reach of the dust. The 
roadside is less lonely ; it is more gay with 
ever-passing vehicles ; and soon the dust 
has covered it as thick as ever. So live 
many Christians ! New creatures in Christ 
Jesus, all things become new, the soul for a 
while lives near to God in Christ ; but too 
soon the dust and rust of worldliness defile 
it, so that none can say without consulting 
the church roll that this one is a professed 
follower of the Lamb. There comes a re- 
vival of religion, some mighty outgush of 
heavenly rains or some sorrow, it may be, 
making the heart better through sadness of 
countenance, and all is bright again. New 
vows are made, but, strange to say, there is 
no effort to get away from the roadside ! 
Nay, even while the fervors of the fresh 
love are in the Spirit, the means, instru- 
ments and provocations to worldliness are 
laid by for future use ! Soon the dust be- 
gins to fall, the heart becomes worldly and 



144 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

another interval of Christ's time is given to 
his crucifiers ! Thus is the Master wounded 
in the house of his friends ! 

A second pebble, like the first, after a 
long experience of this alternation between 
the earthly and the heavenly, begs to be laid 
on the sandy shallows over which the waters 
of the brook glide day and night from year 
to year. And there it lies, beyond the reach 
of dust, reflecting sunbeam and starbeam, 
ever clean and pure and glad of heart, amid 
the song of the rippling waters ! Is there 
no Christian experience like this ? Is there 
no such thing as a life submerged, as it 
were, in the life of Christ, such as shall 
make the soul dead to sin, and for long pe- 
riods even keep the soul dead to sin while 
it is all alive to God ? 

But the question may arise, If the law of 
variation and vicissitude have so largely 
characterized the experience of believers, is 
there no presumption in assuming that 
greater permanence may prevail in our 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 1 45 

own ? Certain considerations may relieve 
us at this point. 

1. We live under the dispensation of the 
Spirit. 

Ages were employed in bringing on the 
Advent; then the Son in person fulfilled 
his work, and went away, saying, " It is ex- 
pedient for you that I go away, for if I go 
not away, the Comforter will not come unto 
you, but if I depart, I will send him unto 
you, and he shall glorify me." Now, surely 
it is not presumption to suppose that the 
years, as they roll us toward millennial 
times and the second coming of Jesus, 
should be characterized by an ever-advan- 
cing light and glory in the experience of 
God's children. 

2. Then the ancient promise, looking to 
this new dispensation, pledges vaster gifts 
to those who truly believe. 

" For this is the covenant that I will make 

with the house of Israel after those days, 

saith the Lord ; I will put my laws into their 
10 



I46 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

mind, and write them in their hearts : and I 
will be to them a God, and they shall be to 
me a people." 

Now, this putting the law into the mind 
and writing it in the heart intimates both a 
higher and more steadily-abiding experience 
of the power of Christian life. 

3. Besides, we, in these later days, have a 
vast advantage over those of more primi- 
tive times in the possession of a completed 
Bible. Not until nearly a hundred years 
after the birth of Christ did believing hands 
ever handle, believing eyes ever see, a com- 
pleted Bible ! 

4. Every passing year enriches God's Is- 
rael with new and precious means of grace. 

We have now a history of the triumphs 
of our holy religion over eighteen hundred 
years of opposition ! We have the stories 
of the Christian martyrs, how they lived and 
how they died ! We have precious libra- 
ries of Christian biography, showing us the 
infinitely varied providences of God with 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 147 

his people and their varying experiences. 
The triumphs of Christianity in Burmah, in 
the Sandwich Islands and elsewhere pass 
before us. Surely, with all these means of 
grace additional to what were enjoyed in 
earlier times, it were no presumption in us 
to expect an increase, a steady increase, in 
both the brilliancy and permanence of spir- 
itual manifestations. 

But the one great encouragement to look 
and hope for the highest and the best is the 
gracious power of our indwelling Christ. 
That One so holy in his nature, that One 
who "loved the Lord with all his heart, 
soul, mind, and strength," and his neighbor 
as himself, who when he was reviled reviled 
not again, and when he suffered threatened 
not, who when smitten on the one cheek 
turned the other for a stroke, that One who 
in addition to his perfect, active obedience 
could bear the guilt of all our sin and take 
it all away, who in his love and mercy, by 
his Spirit, has subdued and now tarries in 



I48 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

my heart, — this One — who will, who dare, limit 
his power over the soul where he dwells ? 
What can he not do in the way of making 
me actually dead to sin and alive to right- 
eousness ? What can he not do in the way 
of flooding my soul with the light and fill- 
ing it with the life of which he is the essence ? 
" Christ our life." Col. iii. 4. If now, by a 
mighty strengthening of the inner man by 
his Spirit, Christ can — and who will say he 
cannot? — lift me to the terrace on Zion's 
sunny hill where I shall experience for one 
moment a full assurance of hope, a full- 
hearted love, an abounding joy and high 
delight in communion with God, — why may 
he not continue this experience to me for 
a second moment, for ten minutes, for an 
hour? Is it extravagant to say that it is 
quite possible that Christ bestows on the 
believer in whom he dwells by faith one 
whole hour of such experience ? But will 
his ability give out in one hour? If for one 
hour, why not for two, for ten, for twenty- 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 149 

four, for a week, for a year, for ten years ? 
Who will put any limit to the power, grace 
and love of our faithful Redeemer, our ever- 
living, ever-loving Friend ? 

The actual variation of Christian experi- 
ence is occasioned sometimes by peculiar- 
ity of temperament, sometimes by physical 
condition, sometimes by varying providences, 
but remember that even over all these Jesus 
Christ is King ! 





XV. 

"OEFORE my mind's eye there is a fam- 
ily hallowed by the presence of the 
ministering angels as they minister to one 
of the number as an heir of salvation. That 
one may be the father of the flock, and I 
ask him, " What blessing upon your family 
would now be most precious in your eye ?" 
Perhaps he would reply, " The conversion of 
my children. They are growing up in a 
world blighted by sin. Peril is everywhere. 
Their hearts are growing harder. Surely, 
then, their inbringing into the kingdom, 
their presence as penitents at the foot of 
the cross, their coming around me as com- 
municants at the Lord's table, — surely this 
would be in accordance with the will of 
Jesus!" 

150 



CHRIST LIVE TH IN ME. 151 

Perhaps, however, as is so often the case, 
the believing member of that family is the 
wife and mother, and as she asks her heart, 
"The bestowal of what one spiritual gift 
forms the burden of my most urgent peti- 
tions at the throne of grace ?" the reply is, 
" The conversion of my husband. All these 
years have I been flying, like a bird with a 
broken wing, slowly, painfully upward, with 
no help on the part of my dearest earthly 
friend. The burden and care of the spirit- 
ual training of the household all falls on me, 
and I am often so weary and discouraged ! 
Oh if my husband would offer me his arm 
to lead me to the communion-table ! Oh if 
he were by my side at that holy supper ! 
Oh if morning and evening he would kneel 
as the priest of the household and lead us 
in our supplications at the throne of grace ! 
Surely, this is the most precious blessing I 
can ask for our own sake and for Jesus' 
sake." 

Or this widowed mother cries, "Oh for 



152 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

my erring boy ! The world's fascinating 
eye is on him, charming him to his ruin. 
The world's blight is marring his beauty, 
and under it he is wasting, wasting away. 
I see dissipation's mark on that dear brow 
so sweet in infancy and childhood. I see 
destruction hunting him body and soul. 
Oh if God would save my beloved, imper- 
iled boy! What other gift so precious 
could he bestow ?" 

Or there is a sister whose heart is aching 
for her brother. Not long ago a young 
woman visited her pastor in his study to 
ask the way to heaven, and as they kneeled 
to pray she said, " Please pray for my 
brother ; he is not a Christian ; he is easily 
led ; we fear for him. Please pray for him !" 
In this family a sister thinks that no other 
blessing could be so precious as the conver- 
sion of that brother ! 

Or it may be that a daughter's heart is 
aching for a father. An excellent Christian 
lady told us of one of these Christian 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. I 53 

daughters. The mother was in heaven. 
The daughter and the father were each the 
other's chiefest earthly treasure. The 
daughter longed and prayed for the conver- 
sion of her father. At length she said, "I 
must speak to him about his soul." But 
what a task for a modest girl with a father 
she respected as well as loved ! " This eve- 
ning," said she to herself — "this evening I 
will speak to him." But during the eve- 
ning every effort failed, and they retired to 
rest without the utterance of that word. 
Another evening came, and as they sat by 
the table many a time the word was on the 
lips, but in vain. It would not voice itself 
in that father's ear. At length the pro- 
tracted anxiety began to wear on her 
spirits and on her frame, and finally she 
said, "If I do not speak to him to-night I 
shall die !" The evening slowly passed 
away, and still the word would not go from 
the lips. They rose to retire ; she took 
his offered arm. They ascended the stairs. 



154 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

Her frame began to tremble. He felt the 
trembling on his arm and looked at her. 
She said, " Father, there is something I wish 
to speak to you about." Alarmed lest 
she might be ill, he quickly asked, "What 
is it, my child?" "Father, your soul!" 
" My child, I will !" And he gave his heart 
to that One who had given his life for him ! 

Who knows how many of these Christian 
daughters, mothers, fathers, sisters, there 
may be, in these homes, who feel that this 
other blessing, more precious than the con- 
version of this or that, or those members, is 
inconceivable ? 

But there is One who knows better than 
any of us what is best for ourselves and our 
families. Let us ask him. 

" Tell us, then, thou Man of Calvary, thou 
with the visage so marred more than any 
man's, and thy form more than the sons of 
men, the dust of every path of beneficence 
on thy pierced feet, the night dews on thy 
sacred brow, the crimson of the cross and 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. I 55 

garden on thy robes, what change in that 
household would most gratify thine heart?" 

In reply I seem to hear him say, and I 
am persuaded I do not misinterpret him, 
" Let each Christian in that household open 
the heart to my indwelling there by faith. 
Let me no longer stay merely ; let me live in 
my living temple there. Let me, set free 
from my imprisonment in the recesses of 
the heart as simply Justifier, be admitted 
into all the channels of the spiritual life as 
Sanctifier. Having saved those heavens 
from ruin, let me now garnish them. Let 
me from this hour live in the vision, in the 
thoughts, in the consciousness, in the affec- 
tions, in the life ; let me be the life of the 
soul !" 

Surely, this is Christ's desire, and that for 
two reasons : 

He is in us as a moulding, controlling 
force, and is it not the instinct of all self- 
conscious forces to be and do all they may? 
That artist — hindrances, whether from pecu- 



156 CHRIST L1VETH IN ME, 

niary inability, stubbornness of material, 
want of opportunity, or from whatever 
cause, are tortures to him. He yearns and 
agonizes to do all he may, that all his powers 
may have full scope to work their will. That 
statesman — exalted to power, with clear 
perception of some grand ideal, some great 
achievement for the common weal — how he 
pants to have his way, how he frets and 
chafes and breaks his heart while he sees 
what might so well be, what peace and 
prosperity, what floods of blessing, might 
come to the nation, were only this, that or 
the other hindrance out of the way! His 
ideal is like a mighty magnet drawing him, 
mocking and torturing him, as he looks 
helplessly on ! That reformer — with his 
great, good heart, his sleep slain by the 
echoes of human woes he would relieve, 
and his scheme so obvious, so sure, so effect- 
ive a remedy, and yet he and it made well 
nigh null and void by useless hindrances 
interposed by petty jealousies or puerile 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. I 57 

ignorance or cunning criminality of human 
wolves who, if he succeed, can no longer 
feed on human lives and fortunes, no longer 
prey on the helpless and innocent. 

Jesus, the fullness of the Godhead, having 
by his obedience and woes won his way into 
the heart, and now there, all power given 
him in heaven and earth — that power of 
exceeding greatness to usward who believe, 
that power now working in us by operation 
of which he is able to do exceeding abun- 
dantly above all that Paul asked and thought 
in that wonderful asking and thinking — how 
can it not be that he longs, yearns, his heart 
throbbing with desire to do in the soul all 
that he can do with a human soul while yet 
in the flesh ? 

What mean the words, " God saw that 
it was good," if not that there was joy in the 
divine bosom that virtue had gone out of 
him and embodied itself in that fair creation ? 
And Christ in us, how can it but be that his 
heart would bound with joy could he see 



158 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME, 

that infinitely better, brighter result of di- 
vine power, a soul full of himself? 

Look at those sunset clouds full of the 
sun, all the colors he has in him woven into 
that robe of glory hanging on the shoulders 
of the western sky. And is not the sun 
glad in that glory? If not, the Sun of 
Righteousness is glad with the gladness 
that comes to him when he sees the travail 
of his soul, when a believer takes him, in all 
his fullness, into all the recesses of his 
being ! 

For another reason, the full consecration 
of a soul to God, the full admission of Christ 
into the vitalities of the soul, is in Jesus' eye 
the richest of blessings, and that is the use- 
fulness of such a soul. What was it gave 
such power to the old prophets? What 
such influence to the early Christians? 
Was it not the impression made by their 
words and aspect that God was in and with 
them? See King David before Nathan — 
King Ahab before Elijah ! 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 1 59 

Few facts of the New Testament more 
solemnly impress my mind than those re- 
specting Paul's labors with individuals 
among the heathen. When I see him " by 
the space of three years going from house 
to house and warning every one, night and 
day, with tears," and this among a people 
heathen with all the filth and fanaticism of 
heathenism, I feel that there is nothing that 
can resist the zeal of a high and true godli- 
ness. Indeed, is not every believer a pro- 
phet ? " Let him that heareth say, Come I" 
Fill now that believer with the fullness of 
God, let the light of an inliving Christ beam 
in his eye, speak on his tongue, breathe in 
his spirit and hallow his life, and he would 
be a bold man who would venture to set 
limits to that believer's power ! 

Who of us has not felt a kind of holy awe 
as we have listened to words of men of ob- 
vious and devoted piety ? We knew a man 
of humble origin, who was found of a gracious 
Saviour and gifted with more than common 



l60 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

fervor c r piety. By the consistency of his 
life he had won the esteem of all who knew 
him. Musing on the work of God in his 
native village, the impression fixed itself in 
his mind, " It is my duty to go through this 
town and pray in every family !" Nor was 
he disobedient to the call. Giving him- 
self in prayer and humility, yet with holy 
zeal, to this work, he actually went from 
door to door, and every door opened before 
him. To him all alike, rich and poor, re- 
fined and unrefined, believer and unbeliever, 
bowed with respect unfeigned, almost with 
reverent awe, and around him they and their 
families bent the knee and listened to or 
joined with him while he prayed with tearful 
fervor for heavenly blessings on their heads 
and home. None could doubt that God 
was with that humble, devout man. Oh fill 
our churches with " God-souls " thus filled 
with Christ, and soon the world would see 
that godliness is power ! 



mm 



s*^i 



*%&^l: 






XVI. 

A ND NOW WE SEEM TO HEAR YOU ASK, 

" HOW MAY THIS BE ? HOW MAY IT BE 

WITH ME?" 

You are a child of God, and yet you 
sometimes doubt this relationship. Perhaps 
even your whole Christian life has been 
one of predominant doubt, fear, distrust. 
A thousand times you have sighed, Oh for 
such an experience as would enable me at 
least once in a while to say, " I know whom 
I have believed !" Or perhaps your expe- 
rience has been such that rarely has the 
enemy been able to master your faith and 
hope, and your average experience has been 
one of peace and joy ! 

Whatever may be the fact as to your 
frames of mind, if you are a true child of 



11 



161 



1 62 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

God, you are in Christ. You have put on 
Christ as a shield against condemnation ; all 
his endurance of penal wrath is yours. You 
are crucified with Christ. Further, you are 
accepted as righteous in the Beloved. You 
are completely and for ever justified ! Be- 
sides this, Christ is in you. You were bap- 
tized into him in order that he might be in 
you with all his power to sanctify and mould 
into his blessed image. 

But notwithstanding all this, your rela- 
tionship to him and his relationship to you 
and all your actual experience of his grace, 
you still feel and know that but a very 
small proportion of the legitimate effects of 
the in-being of a crucified Christ in your 
heart has been realized in your actual ex- 
perience. You are thoroughly persuaded 
that there lie above you terraces of gra- 
cious realization to which you have never 
climbed, there is a possible vividness of as- 
surance you have never compassed, fervors 
of holy love and joy that have never kindled 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 1 63 

your heart, there is a style of Christian life 
superior to anything you have ever achieved. 
And now, as many a time before, you are 
asking, " On what conditions, by what 
methods and means, may I attain to this 
better experience ?" 

Unless he who writes these words is 
greatly mistaken, the number of those who 
ask this question is large, very large, and 
increasingly large. It is one of the precious 
signs of the times that the hunger and 
thirst after righteousness are becoming more 
intense and more general. Our own heart 
has been tenderly touched at the sighs we 
have heard in prayer and the earnest words 
of inquiry respecting a closer walk with 
God. It was our privilege under, as we 
cannot doubt, the guidings of the Holy 
Spirit, to make the words which form the 
text of this little volume the subject of a 
discourse for the opening year 1871, and to 
give it to our people and take it for ourself 
as a year- word — " Christ liveth in me." 



1 64 CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 

The subject has been presented again 
and again in various forms, and has come 
back to us again and again from one and 
another in the question, " How may it be so 
with me? What are the conditions and 
means of this closer walk with God ?" 

i . We answer, first, believe it possible to 
you. Believe that something greatly better 
than you have ever known is quite within 
your reach. 

Here, as everywhere in the field of relig- 
\on } faith is indispensable. Where unbelief 
is strong, Christ cannot do many mighty 
works. He may have a " few sick folk " even 
through instrumentality of a feeble faith. 
And he may, through a like faith, dispel 
doubts and clouds here and there, but noth- 
ing like a rose-crowned June of Christian 
experience is possible to him who does not 
believe in the possibility of such a style of 
experience. 

In this believer Christ is, in the mystic 
relationship of spiritual union, but that one 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 1 65 

does not believe that it is practically possi- 
ble that he can be so strengthened with 
might by his spirit in the inner man as that 
Christ should thus dwell, live in his heart ; 
that he should be thus rooted and grounded 
in love, and understand the love of Christ 
that passeth knowledge, and be filled full of 
God. He does not believe that "according 
to the power now actually working in him " 
God is able to do in him above all that we 
ask or think ! God might do this with 
Paul, with the saints at Ephesus, with Haly- 
burton, with Edwards, but with him — no, it 
is practically impossible ! Why, he is a man 
of business, and his depravities are so played 
upon hour by hour, and his thoughts so en- 
grossed with cares and anxieties, that any- 
thing like this is simply impossible ! This 
one is a woman of position, intelligence, 
fashion, the moving spirit in a circle that 
would lift up both hands in amazement, and 
pour out a torrent of mingled pity and con- 
tempt, at the puritanical folly that would 



1 66 CHRIST LIVE TH IN ME. 

tear the heart from the world and offer it to 
be filled with all the fullness of God. 

Well, my brother, my sister in the Lord, 
if you cannot credit the practicability of this 
through Jesus your Redeemer, if you will 
thus limit the Holy One of Israel, you will 
pass your life without the luxuries of that 
better and closer walk with God which else 
might fill the hours of your life on earth. 
To believe that it is possible for Christ to 
live in your thoughts, your aims, your affec- 
tions, your life, live there as an ever and 
mightily energizing vitality, is indispensable 
to any high realization of this in-living. 

2. Then this in-living must be desired. 

It may be asked, How is it possible that 
a true Christian should not desire to be 
wholly a Christian — desire to have Christ in 
the highest practicable sense always living 
in the soul? But experience abundantly 
proves that it is possible to be a Christian 
and yet be satisfied with the security certi- 
fied in justification, without being over-de- 



CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 1 67 

sirous of the purity and thorough self-devo- 
tion implied in a mature sanctification. 
Flesh dies hard. The lusts are expelled 
only by a crucifixion. A thousand things 
in the world, the ungodly world, are sweet 
to the natural tastes, and we part with them 
as we part with a right hand or a right eye. 

But if one is ever to rise out of the 
slough, is ever to climb up from the murky 
vales around the base of the mount to the 
terraces nearer the sun, he must add to his 
faith that it is possible for him, the earnest 
desire that this possibility become actual 

3. These points settled, there must be 
willingness mid purpose to part with whatever 
in the affections and the life stands in the 
way of this indwelling. "A closer walk 
with God is possible. A closer walk I 
covet. Now away with whatever in my 
heart and life piles barriers in my path !" 
But to make even such a purpose of much 
avail there must also be an honest and 
prayerful desire to know the actual hin- 



1 68 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

drances. We are often too willing to be- 
lieve that this and that is not inconsistent 
with piety, while God knows that piety and 
these cannot dwell together. We must be 
willing to know that that darling thing, 
whatever it may be, this or that form of 
recreation, these and those associations, 
these and those habits of speech and con- 
duct, are to a high order of piety as frost to 
tender flowers, and knowing this, we must 
be resolute to sacrifice them all. 

4. Believing that a great advance in our 
religious experience is a possibility, desiring 
it and having a readiness to abolish sinful 
hindrances, the next step is to resolve on ob- 
taining all that by the grace of God may 
be reached in our own experience. 

The prodigal said, " I will arise and go to 
my father/' Meditation issued in resolve. 
The soul, having gained a glimpse of the 
felicities and glories of this in-living, having 
seen the paltriness of all else in comparison 
with it, resolves before God to make all 



CHRIST LIFE Til IN ME. 1 69 

called-for sacrifices, to use all appointed 
means and to give not over until victory 
crowns the struggle. As to what sacrifices 
may be needed and what means may be 
profitable, the Holy Spirit will be your 
teacher. 

Finally, to sum up the whole in a word, 
grieve not the Holy Spirit of God. 

It is by his Spirit that Christ dwells in us. 
To grieve his Spirit is to shut Christ out of 
the acting, conscious life of the soul. To 
disbelieve his power to do in you exceeding 
abundantly above all that we ask or think, 
not to desire ardently the operation of that 
power in that mighty doing, unwillingness 
to part with a darling sin, that moral feeble- 
ness that even with the golden prize before 
the eye fails to gird itself up to the purpose 
to forget what is behind and reach after 
that which is before, — all these things grieve 
the Spirit who waits and longs to exhibit 
and impart to us the unsearchable riches of 
Christ. 



I70 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

If, in the prosecution of this life, we be 
surprised into sin of thought, word and 
deed, let us instantly, instantly, take that sin 
to Christ. In the journal of Dr. Addison 
Alexander we see that he very early learned 
this important lesson. 

"June 5. — Read a considerable part of 
Halyburton's life with avidity and astonish- 
ment. I seemed to be reading a history of 
my own life. I speak within bounds when 
I say that up to the age of twenty his spir- 
itual history is mine in almost every point. 

"On one head particularly I have been 
much edified. When my conscience has 
been wounded by relapses into sin, I have 
always been tempted to sink down into a 
sullen apathy, or else to wait a day or two 
before approaching to God again. It has 
seemed to me on such occasions that it 
would be aw r fully presumptuous and inso- 
lent to ask God to forgive me on the spot. 

" It has pleased God this afternoon to use 
the memoir as an instrument in fixing on 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. \J\ 

my mind a strong conviction that the only 
reasonable course is to come at once and 
ask forgiveness in the name of Christ." 

How almost overwhelming is the sense 
of divine love that follows in our souls the 
realization that, as a Father, God in Christ 
is ever at our side, ready on the instant to 
forgive every sin and take us again into 
favor ! 

But there is something better even than 
this instant seeking for pardon, and that is 
such an indwelling of Christ as to repress 
our depravities, hinder their action and fill 
us with the fullness of God. 

Let us, beloved in the Lord, to aid us 
in our climbing, so put these passages of 
Scripture here given, and others similar to 
them, into our memories, that they will ever 
be as ready as the alphabet on our tongue. 

" What shall we say then ? Shall we con- 
tinue in sin, that grace may abound ? God 
forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, 
live any longer therein ? Know ye not, 



172 CHRIST LIVETH IN ME. 

that so many of us as were baptized into 
Jesus Christ were baptized into his death ? 
Knowing this, that our old man is crucified 
with him, that the body of sin might be de- 
stroyed, that henceforth we should not serve 
sin. For he that is dead is freed from sin. 
Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be 
dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God 
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let not 
sin therefore reign in your mortal body, 
that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. 
Neither yield ye your members as instru- 
ments of unrighteousness unto sin: but 
yield yourselves unto God, as those that 
are alive from the dead, and your members 
as instruments of righteousness unto God. 
For sin shall not have dominion over you : 
for ye are not under the law, but under 
grace." Rom. vi. 1-3, 6, 7, 11-14. 

" If ye then be risen with Christ, seek 
those things which are above, where Christ 
sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your 
affection on things above, not on things on 



CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 1 73 

the earth. For ye are dead, and your life 
is hid with Christ in God." Phil. iii. 1-3. 

" This then is the message which we have 
heard of him, and declare unto you, that 
God is light, and in him is no darkness at 
all. If we say that we have fellowship with 
him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do 
not the truth. But if we walk in the light, 
as he is in the light, we have fellowship one 
with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ 
his Son cleanseth us from all sin." 1 John 

i. 5-7. 

" Blessed be the God and Father of our 

Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with 

all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in 

Christ. According as he hath chosen us in 

him before the foundation of the world, that 

we should be holy and without blame before 

him in love." Eph. i. 3-4. 

"Wherefore I also, after I heard of your 

faith in the Lord Jesus, and love unto all 

the saints, cease not to give thanks for 

you, making mention of you in my prayers ; 



174 CHRIST LIVE Til IN ME. 

That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the 
Father of glory, may give unto you the 
spirit of wisdom and revelation in the know- 
ledge of him : the eyes of your under- 
standing being enlightened; that ye may 
know what is the hope of his calling, and 
what the riches of the glory of his inherit- 
ance in the saints, and what is the exceed- 
ing greatness of his power to usward who 
believe, according to the working of his 
mighty power, which he wrought in Christ, 
when he raised him from the dead, and set 
him at his own right hand in the heavenly 
places, far above all principality, and power, 
and might, and dominion, and every name 
that is named, not only in this world, but 
also in that which is to come." Eph. i. 15- 
21. 

" For this cause I bow my knees unto the 
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom 
the whole family in heaven and earth is 
named, that he would grant you, according 
to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened 



CHRIST LIVETII IN ME. 1 75 

with might by his Spirit in the inner man ; 
that Christ may dwell in your hearts by 
faith ; that ye, being rooted and grounded 
in love, may be able to comprehend with all 
saints what is the breadth, and length, and 
depth, and height ; and to know the love of 
Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye 
might be filled with all the fullness of God." 
Eph. iii. 14-21. 

11 Now unto Him that is able to do exceed- 
ing abundantly above all that we ask or 
think, according to the power that worketh 
in us, unto him be glory in the church by 
Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world 
without end. Amen. And the very God 
of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray 
God your whole spirit and soul and body 
be preserved blameless unto the coming of 
our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is He that 
calleth you, who also will do it. i Thess. v. 
23, 24. 



if ! . 



